Both Jeff Freeman and Damion Schubert are discussing death penalties in massive online games. Observing the trend and commenting. The focus is about these penalities becoming less relevant, becoming lightened-up.
Jeff’s conclusion is:
Note that these are very different things than “Make death something players want to avoid”. Players don’t want to die anyway. In considering what should happen when a player dies, that is not a consideration in my mind. Or at least not a top one. We already want to avoid death, just eliminate any benefit that would result in us suiciding in spite of the fact that we don’t want to die.
That is enough for the game to work, but not so much that only the hard-core will play it.
Damion’s conclusion is:
We need to figure out how to get players to be willing and happy to take more risks, because risky play is what gets the adrenaline going, and is by extension more interesting and engaging gameplay. This means that designers will continue to monkey with death mechanisms far in the future.
In particular I agree with everything Damion wrote before this ending line. Because instead I strongly disagree with his conclusion.
I explained all this in an analysis I wrote in April.
I follow exactly the same line of thoughts but my conclusion is different. Right now Warcraft does exactly what Damion wants (go check my analysis): take risks, push the experience further, try new things, explore etc… Exactly because the game doesn’t try to punish you constantly as you *dare*. What is obsolete is the risk/reward mechanic used as the ONLY core of a mmorpg. Everything in this genre is designed after this model and I’m NOT saying that the balance isn’t optimized, I’m saying that the model itself is obsolete.
I proposed months ago a way to tweak the death penalty in WoW, trying to incentivate the group survival. Instead of adding an XP loss I proposed to build a bonus. The more you kill monsters without dying, the more you accumulate a % bonus on the exp you gain. Till a max of 20%. If you die the bonus goes to 0. In a group this mechanic is based on the survival. If 51% of the group survives the encounter the bonus goes up. It goes to zero if 50% of more of the group is killed.
This makes the death less trivial. Originally I imagined the system to encourage the PvP. Based on DAoC’s realm points. The problem was the continue run of players in a battle, over and over, giving zero importance to a possible death (well explained by Jeff as the “death penalty objective one”, go read). What Mythic did? They added two stacking res sickness, preventing this dumb combat style by adding a timesink. So you cannot play anymore if you died. The result is that the death has now a meaning and the survival is encouraged because you don’t want to sit down and wait. But this is stupid, because to give a meaning to a part of the game they made it extremely unfun and annoying. It’s obviously not smooth design already in the premise and, as a side effect, it’s extremely hard to understand. Penalties and sub-penalties. With exceptions and different timers with each a different mechanic. A design mess.
There are better ways to give a meaning to a system without punishing the player? Yes. My solution is simple even for a child: instead of punishing you can work on “positive bonuses”. Someone a bit more clever will say that the gap between a bonus and the absence of a bonus is exactly the same concept of “penalty” but I do not agree. The core system where is the reason why WoW is “different” is that the penalty isn’t “faked” directly as a bonus. Instead the penalty is never *negative*. That’s the point. In a progess-driven game you aren’t loosing that progress in ANY way. You CANNOT loose experience, you CANNOT loose your items. What you can do is advance more or less slowly. This is the real difference between a “positive penalty” and one that is negative.
DAoC’s RvR is another system that I can define successful. I hope we can agree here. Why? Because it’s again a progress-driven game where the penalty is ONLY positive. You CANNOT loose your realm points. But you can loose a battle, you can loose a keep, you can loose a relic and so on. You can see the point? The “winning” direction is about shifting the focus from the mechanic itself to THE GAME. The penalty should be about A PURPOSE. Instead of punishing the players because they try, the game should offer them reasons to fight, goal to accomplish. OUTSIDE the limit of their single characters.
The point is that in a mmorpg a death already doesn’t exist. Giving a meaning to it is just another way to break the game itself. The market already demonstrated that positive penalties are way more successful than risk/reward mechanics. Risk/reward pivots around frustration. A game based on the frustration isn’t a good game. It isn’t fun, it isn’t compelling and it isn’t deep. It’s a game with a workaround for an unsolved problem. So we need to solve the problem and make the game pivot on stronger and more valid elements.
There’s also another side of the truth. What’s the gameplay offered? Games like Everquest or DAoC (pertinent to PvE) simply offer a repetitive gameplay often seen as “work”. It’s not interesting, it’s not compelling. But it does the trick because the focus is the advancement and the work is the gap which separates the different goals. The death penalty here is a tool to regulate and control the “pace”. Again following the risk/reward mechanic. In WoW there’s finally some more. There’s an experience that is more near to a single player game. We follow a story and that’s the focus. The death penalty is something completely “outside” the gameplay. What we do is already fun and involving and doesn’t need a side-system to become “excused” or valuable. This is why we can finally play and only as a consequence we also advance. The game has something to offer. The death penalty isn’t anymore an obstacle and a system clashing with another. It is coordinated with the rest of the game. The game simply wipes even the effort at reproducing a win/lose mechanic. There’s an experience and all the mechanics of the game are focused to make this experience possible and fun. It isn’t anymore a Pindaric flight about messy game mechanics desperately trying to reproduce and balance various consequences. Blizzard here simply focuses on what is meaningful and designs the game so that it goes straight toward that precise goal. Simple, logic and completely self consistent design that makes sense and doesn’t need any form of workarounds and bandaids.
My conclusion is very simple: World of Warcraft is more self-conscious of what it is. It knows (and it chose) its limits and then it focuses on what it can do right within those limits.
At this point I wrote other considerations, in particular about the PvP. This because I identify two different phases that offer something to consider and learn. There’s a third phase I won’t directly explain here but which simply follows Blizzard’s model: try to understand where the genre holds its potential and try to deliver it aiming at its heart, without fiddling around it. What’s the content of this phase? Trying to focus the attention of the players outside their character. In the PvP this means involving them in a story which is based on concrete purposes and goals. I completely agree (and disagreeing with Damion) as I explained above that we cannot use the death system to make the PvP meaningful. But we can still offer something deep. For example building up a conquest system. Where players don’t gain anymore just “realm points” to boost their skills, instead they take part into a story with concrete elements. Where they CAN win and loose. But within a concrete structure offering a hook for groups of players playing together to reach a communal goal. Finally we remove the OOC (Out Of Character) completely and we are able to involve the player through the character. Inside the game-layer. This is an healthy process that will open positive side-effects. New potential to discover and to expand and not a closure or a sperimental attitude losing pieces everywhere and in the constant need of workarounds and bandaids.
Here below I describe the first two phases. They were the beginning of this article but then I noticed that I was triggering something too complex, loosing completely the focus. So I desperately tried to reorganize everything hoping that it makes a bit more sense.
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I think we had two different phases till now. The first phase is the loved and hated Ultima Online old-style. The PvP with substantial consequences. Many think about it as a “golden age”, an experience that cannot be replicated in any other game. But what happened? Trammel/Fellucca. The designers decided to draw a line between PvP and PvE and this destroyed the “paradise”. Many at this point consider UO loosing its soul and becoming just a shade of itself. The (partial) truth is that many, many players decided to took advantage of the new mechanic and flee away from open PvP whenever possible. The truth is partial because often the possibilities that a game offers can go against the fun and the depth and still be followed by the players. Trammel is a shield, a safe-land, and everyone obviously took advantage of this new “advantage”. But the advantage also disrupted the depth that made the whole world. So the players were offered more “guarantees” and control over their own experience, but this dumbed down the experience itself. The system was based on the “unexpected”, about being at risk always, without safety nets. When they made this risk as a possibility they made it a “choice”. And the choice of a risk is something different than *being at risk*. This is obviously a strong Out Of Character (OOC) mechanic that in the first UO was present and was wiped from the second. There’s also the other half of the truth, though. It’s a fact that the players ask for those safety nets. The success of the game is strongly dependent on those nets. This is why I consider the first phase as a niche market. It involves OOC mechanics with a strong impact but it’s a reality that involves and is fun for a minority of the players. I’d say more: the strong impact is the consequence of this unbalance. The world has a majority of victims and a minority of hunters. This makes the hunters have a lot of fun, the world is their playground. Since it’s an OOC mechanic this also brings directly to griefing. The system is “broken” because the “fun” is for a “few”, at the expense of many.
Then there’s a second phase that I identify with Dark Age of Camelot. This game demontrated that PvP not only can be fun without exploiting the winners/losers dichotomy, but it can also be commercially doable and possible for *all* the players and not just by a few hardcore. This game definitely did a step in the right direction, opening a new stack of possibilities. But then it stopped. I think that if we look at the panorama from a general point of view we *cannot* say that PvP is niche and PvE is mass market. In DAoC there’s only one PvE server against 18 where there is PvP. In EverQuest is the opposite. Now In World of Warcraft the two “factions” are even, with a slight prevalence of the PvP crowd. I think it’s obvious that the debate PvP vs PvE has no sense on its own. What matters is the implementation. None is “better”, not from the quality point of view nor from the commercial possibilities. It’s the offer that shapes the market and only as a consequence it happens the opposite. So what’s the core difference between the first phase I descibed above and this one? What is different is that the PvP is available to everyone. It is fun for everyone and doesn’t pivot on the frustration of a group to reward and make happy the other. It’s less OOC. The loss is always trivial and just an incentive to retry, as fast as possible. The actual gameplay becomes the center, the consequences of a fight become a side-effect as minimal as possible.
We move from a first phase where the penalties are everything to a phase where the penalties don’t exist anymore. We lose the depth, the meaning, the purpose. The goal now isn’t about going back. But it’s about how we can mantain everything we have gained and *add* the depth we missed.