I started talking yesterday about dying in today’s MMO games. I labeled it as “Part 1?, though I wasn’t really sure what I would write for the second part. I knew, however, that writing the first article would get me thinking about it, and I would probably have at least something more to add later on. Well, after stewing on the issue for a little while yesterday and this morning, I have that little extra something to add: Part 2!

I made an effort yesterday to point out why I don’t believe that a death penalty exists to “add playtime” to the game, for any reason. I’d like to clarify this point and, at the same time, chance my stand on the issue a bit. I said yesterday that there are plenty of ways to force (whatever it means to be “forced” in an online world) players to play a bit longer and thus increase your subscription, but I don’t believe that death is one of them. I still believe this. However, coupled with a larger world, longer quests, a more detailed and consistent set of background lore to fulfill, and longer battles, a death penalty could serve to increase the playtime of many people. The glory of the MMO generation is that if your game has even a slightly large population, having this increase in playtime applied to everyone uniformly would add up to a very respectable total. So, to be sure, I don’t believe that death on its own is more than a negligible contribution to additional playtime (at least for the majority of a given playerbase, who will quit the game after reaching the cap level).

If not to benefit the greedy capitalists, what are death penalties for, anyway?

Well, to answer this, I think it’s good to start with some of the responses from the original mmorpg.com forum thread that started this whole discussion in the first place.

First idea, put forth by an mmorpg.com user:

I don’t know about most people but I like death penelty because of the feeling that if I lose I’ll actually lose which makes me play better and actually gives me a bit of a rush when pvp as apposed to other games were I lose nothing so theirs no reason for me to feel like I need to stay alive Hope thats clear

First of all, that sentence is so long that I drifted off in the middle of it. I started watching this video, which, as bad as the video was, was a better investment of time than trying to decipher that sentence.

First idea:

For many folks the thrill in the game comes from the risk of loss….the great the loss, the more fun they have….

This is an idea that was brought up many times during this discussion, and I feel it’s a very important point to consider in its various forms. MMO and RPG developers were once (or are still) MMO and RPG players themselves. Wouldn’t that somehow imply, then, that they are putting their ideas and visions of the perfect MMO or RPG into play during the game’s creation? Vanguard may not have been the best game ever*, it was Brad McQuaid’s ultimate vision, and for him, probably one of the best RPGs he’ll ever play (err, that’s up for debate).

If we know this, then we can surmise that the reason for a death penalty at all (and the reason your character doesn’t simply stand up again after death) may be to impose some kind of heightened sense of accomplishment for not dying. It’s a simple concept, really. You’re in a battle that will push the limits of your level and your skill. If you die, you know you are going to lose your last hour or so of work, and you’re going to have to run back and perhaps brave this area again. If you die, you’re going to be very unhappy, and perhaps even frustrated with the game or with your course of actions. However, if you live, you’re going to be equally as happy, your body will release those lovable endorphins, and you’ll become even further drawn into the world of psychological addiction** and intrigue that is MMO gaming. So yes, the original idea is a good one, and could perhaps be a compelling reason for a death penalty. As anyone in economics, finance, or gaming will tell you: with no risk comes no reward (except, as pointed out to me by a friend, in riskless money markets, where the reward is ~5% APY).

Second idea, not really an idea, but I’ll talk about it anyway:

Losing exp is no fun […] Losing gear? I can’t get down with that. […] Running back to my corpse isnt really much of a penalty. Neither is paying for armor repairs, even though it could get expensive after many deaths.

Ah, this person touches on something that many MMO players, especially new ones and those in “denial” (they won’t acknowledge that an online society is just as complex as a “real” life one, whatever that even means) don’t realize. Time is money, so losing experience and having to pay for repairs are fundamentally one and the same. However, and I think many people will agree with me on this, I think that repair costs are far less psychologically and emotionally taxing on a player than an experience loss. Experience loss is one of the most horrific things that can happen to you as a player. There’s some big, evil hang that reaches into your character and takes what you’ve earned. Not fun. Paying repairs, however, can be normalized to the point where, at least when the servers are new, the time it takes to make the money to repair is the same as the amount of time it takes to earn back that lost XP. Of course, in a game like WoW, where there’s only repair costs and no experience loss, the effect diminishes greatly for alts, wherein the player’s main can fund almost unlimited repairs for the alt with only a nominal time investment.

Maybe EQ2 hit the nail on the head with their system: repairs, which are expensive but not horrendously so, and a system of experience “debt” wherein the player earns only half of their regular experience. That way, nothing is taken from the player directly, and the time investment can be smoothed out over hours of play. There’s no interruption of the “moving forward” aspect of the game that most people are so fond of.

Third idea:

It keeps people from being complete idiots in groups.

This is a good one — imposing a penalty for death means that, in a group, imposing your lack of skills on your teammates will result in not only wasting your time, but their’s as well. No one likes the guy in the group who keeps wiping them. In all fairness, there are more situations in a group in which people are likely to die, but the cause is usually reasonably transparent. To me, this is one of the most compelling reasons for a death penalty. With an online society like is present in most MMOs, getting a name for yourself as being bad in a group is not the kind of reputation you want. This is more of a “social darwinist” perspective on the situation, but I think that, out of the reasons outlined in Part 1 and Part 2, this is the most fundamental to the online experience.

Anyway, this post is dragging on somewhat, so I’ll gather my thoughts and maybe there’ll be a part 3 that’s actually interesting!

*millions agree
**not scientifically proven… yet

One thing that games nowadays aren’t missing is quests. There are plenty of quests everywhere, some of them to kill ten rats, some of them to take this letter to the other npc, and some of them to guide you to the next step of your journey. In fact, there are so many quests in today’s MMOs that there are entire databases devoted to cataloguing them. So what? Maybe the reason that all of these quests need be organized and stored away on some too-often-visited website is because they’re so incoherent.

One of the main differences between offline- and online role playing games is the coherence of the main storyline. Why has such a crucial element to both character- and world-development been neglected for so long? Has the focus, up to now, always been on making a decent world for players to thrive in rather than giving them the means by which to thrive?

Playing the epic quest line in The Lord of the Rings Online has reminded what it’s like to have a strong storyline guiding your progress as you adventure throughout the world. While keeping to these quests is optional (and, of course, this is probably preferable to some), the development of your own character through the quest rewards as well as the development of other characters within the game world makes them very worthwhile. After having played World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2 for so long, I’d forgotten what it’s like to have such a strong storyline driving my character. Guild Wars has a similar emphasis on storyline, yes, but the Lord of the Rings story is one that I already know so well.

It seems to me that the one way, above all others (one way to rule them all), for Lord of the Rings to be successful was to get players engaged in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. I think that by adding such a tightly-knit series of quests that lead your character through the war of the ring was the best possible method by which Turbine could have achieved that goal. Sure, the environment is great, the graphics are superb, and the combat is acceptable; without the back story, though, all of those things matter little. For each of those categories there are games which beat out Lord of the Rings Online; It’s when they’re combined, though, that this game really shines.

How is it that the EverQuests and World of Warcrafts of this decade were able to hack it with but barely a hint of a centralized plot? Sure, EverQuest has some lore that it always seems like they made up after the fact and, yes, World of Warcraft has like 8 books out which somehow makes the back-story more “legitimate”. These facts come up very often in game to anyone who already knows about them. Where’s the personal journey, though? I thought I was playing these games for myself, to have fun. Why would I want to do anything if it’s only going to bring some out some dark prophecy that was written about 4 years ago by some struggling fiction writer?

The thing that Lord of the Rings Online has that these games don’t is the way that it really makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger that’s happening within the world. Instancing open areas within the world really emphasizes this, as it makes you feel like you’re having a bigger effect on things than you really are. Helping warn a group of rogues that one of their own and one of your newly-found friends is after their lives is one of the many things I’ve had to do so far on my character, and the process of doing it in this game feels more like a single-player driven story than any other MMO I’ve played. I just never really “felt it” in any of the other games.

Seeing that flaming ring above an NPCs head, I think, is going to be just the thing that could keep me going in LoTRO for quite some time to come.

In light of my last post, I wanted to talk about running, movement, and travel in online games. More specifically, I want to talk about why moving, running, and traveling for no specific reason is often so much better than traveling as part of a quest or duty.

Maybe it’s just the type of player I am, but I love to explore. In EverQuest 2, World of Warcraft, and Guild Wars, I wouldn’t want to stop playing a zone until all of the black space was gone (this is, in my opinion, hardest to achieve in EverQuest 2, because of the way they display the black fog. It’s impossible to tell where the limits of the map are!).

In order to explore places, you’ve gotta buck up and run there. However, when I look back on the time I spent exploring an area, it sometimes seems daunting (maybe I could have done other things, like, say, level up 14 times). Even though I’ve spent a ton of time familiarizing myself with the area, the running around trying to find the smallest nooks and most obscure crannies at the extreme edges of the map never really seems exhausting or repetitive.

Even though I love exploring and running around opening up all of the map, I find that I absolutely hate running places for quests. Even more than that, I hate running back to the spot where I died. But, and this is the most superlative hate I can muster, I hate running back into and across raid zones after wiping.

Why the differing levels of enjoyment? It’s not like I’m running that far to get back to my corpse or to finish that quest. The time I spend sneaking around mobs exploring zones I’m not qualified for far outweighs my measly jog back to the raid zone, but the latter still seems very time consuming. Of course it’s a psychological thing, but the point still remains. Why are games today seemingly going backwards in some of these aspects of gameplay? The Vanguards, the LoTROs, etc, all seem to have a strong emphasis on the running timesink and it seems like game designers should be able to do better.

Think about it this way: how much would you spend to have an autonomous in-game object take you to your destination at an increased speed in a direct route (400% run speed griffons in WoW), or at least close to it? Well, the answer to that is simple: just look at the prices that griffon masters and stable hands are charging in WoW and LoTRO. Most people would probably pay even more than that.

Now, here’s the harder one: would you pay for a service that ran you to your destination at your run speed? This means that you’re simply paying someone else to steer for you, and not arriving at the destination any sooner.

Is it the boringness and blandness of manning the controls of your character when you know you’re only going to be running? Is it the time consumption itself?
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In a very interesting and through-provoking article over at Strangelands, author pixiestyx looks at the double-causation involved in defining an environment with your character versus defining your character through your environment. It reminds me of that quote (and the namesake of this post) from The Departed, when Jack Nicholson says:

I don’t wanna be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me.

It’s early in the movie and it really puts the rest of the movie into perspective, but I don’t want to talk about The Departed, I want to talk about computer games. Here is where I get to talk about what it means for fantasy in general, and role-playing games in particular. The main question in that post revolves around whether or not there needs to be an explicit declaration of the environment and background of where the game takes place in order for a player to feel comfortable playing a given fantasy-type character.

However, for example and there are many examples out, In the Dreseden files, the setting is the modern world and has fairies, elves and demons bouncing around quite happily in it. Would you be comfortable playing an elf in this environment ? Yes as the background clearly defines who you are and why am I here.

In the case of a MMOG, I think that this might be the case.

From what I know about RPGs in general and from the experience I’ve gained from those which I’ve played, I feel like a strong background is an important point in the development of a character. However, when I think about EverQuest II and the way that particular game started off, I begin to have doubts. Is there really very much character development going on in the beginning of this game?

EverQuest II begins (or, at least nearer release, began) on a boat where the captain asks you to perform some simple tasks for him. Before you leave the boat you achieve level 3, at which point you have no class or any other notion of what you are, other than your race. The races cover the gamut from regular (human) to completely wild (frog). Well, where’s the normality in this? What kind of environment could we possibly be living in where Frogs and Humans are on equal ground? In a world where racism for the smallest differences in human skin run rampant, what kind of ill-founded notions of equality must we shed in order to believe that a Human could possibly consider a Frog his equal?

After this ship experience, the player chooses the kind of adventurer they want to be and begin to perform more tasks on the island in pursuit of a new set of gear and the approval of the captain. At this point, the player begins to interact with the other player characters around them. They learn how to move fluidly, how to fight, how to move the camera, and how to interact with the user interface. Other people around them are busy learning the same things, and this forms a way for them to bond with one another.

There’s really no character development during this portion of the game. You’re on an island, there’s absolutely no lore behind the place, you got there from a boat onto which you were somehow taken by some mysterious force. There’s essentially no backstory to the beginning of this game, but there is something else which is equally important acting on the player: other people.

The story comes later, of course, as the adventurer makes his travels through the myriad cities and towns of post-shattering Norrath, but that’s not what kept people coming back in those vital first moments of the game. Not the story: the people.

Do you think that back-story and the environment is more important for defining your character for who they are, or do you think that the people who surround your character on a continuous basis are a more important foundation for your character?

There’s was an interesting discussion a few days back in the MMORPG.com forums called “why death penalty?“, and it started quite a long discussion regarding what death and the death penalties in RPGs are meant to do.

Among some straight-up idiotic answers were a few gems interspersed throughout the 4 pages of the thread, and they were summarized in this community spotlight at the same site.

One interesting thing to note about popular reaction to this question was the common occurrence of the (in my opinion) “cop out” answer of “it makes you play longer so the developers get more money”. Well, I personally think that’s complete garbage. First, if you die, let’s assume it takes one hour to get back to where you were before it happened (in my experiences, that’s a generously large number for a player with any skill or focus at all). This could be corpse retrieval, regrinding to recoup an experience loss, or myriad other things. Now, assume that a player dies once every 5 hours of play. That means, then, that they’re accomplishing 4 hours of leveling for every 5 hours of play. I think that’s another reasonable number for a moderate player (the kind developers would so easily trick). Now, if it takes 10 days to reach the maximum level, that’s 240 hours of play time, or 288 hours (accounting for the time lost to death (240/5) + 240). A moderate player could be assumed to play 3 hours per day. That means it takes him 80 days of playing to get to cap, and 16 days of playing to recoup his losses from death. What subscriptions do you know of where a developer would be willing to implement a system as complex as a balanced death penalty for an additional amount of time that won’t even have the person buying an additional month of play? (Even if they died twice as often, it would amount to 32 days, which would yield them only an additional $15 per player… or none at all if you consider today’s free-to-play and box-to-play games).

As far as I’m concerned, there are better ways to make the player use those extra 48 hours over the course of their entire game lifetime. Writing 20 new quests would probably take a staff member (who is probably paid less than a developer anyway) less time than implementing a system like this, and I think many would agree that spending 48 hours doing 20 quests would be far more fun than spending 48 hours trying to get back to where they were.

Now, this isn’t to say that I’m not a supporter of the death penalty (*insert comedy track*), but I think that we as gamers can come up with better reasons than this.

One of my favorite answers (or, justifications if you will) is the concept of risk versus reward. If there’s no death penalty, then, to some degree, loot becomes meaningless. If you are able to zerg the same area with one person, with two people (with 40 people?) then eventually, by chance, we should expect something good out of it. How many times have you seen that sad sorry sole grinding on mobs that are 15 levels higher than him, dying every few minutes, but coming out better in the long haul because he’s getting bigger experience hits and a tad more loot per mob than his more reasonable counterparts. If there were no death penalty, this person would be able to do this all the time, without worrying about having to spend the little extra money he’s gaining or losing some other, more permanent aspect of his game experience (maybe his time).

With a death penalty, however, this situation becomes less and less believable. One of the common implementations of death penalty is some version of “losing your stats temporarily”. This happens on timers in some games (WoW), conditions in others (EQ2, getting your shard), and in other games you simply have to deal with it and earn the stats back through mob killing (Guild Wars). Well, if little johnny adventurous was having trouble killing that mob 15 levels higher than him when he was at full stats, then killing it with a big debuff is not going to be an option. So, in that regard, death penalty is a good way to implement further balance controls.

Another reason for the death penalty is the one I like to call the “Darnwinian Death Penalty Theory” and it goes something like this:

Be honest with yourself and decide, is it better to be a high level character that anyone can create and achieve (even the stupid and inept) or high level in a system where it takes strategy, planning and skill to get there.

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Like most, the theory is good, but doesn’t really have as big a place in the real world as it should. How many truly inept people and poor players are still able to get to the level caps and into the bigger end-game guilds? If a player dies more, and it takes a little more time to get back to where they were, all they have to do is play that much more every day in order to keep up with the big dogs. They’ll get to cap just the same as everyone else, it just might take them a bit longer. Anyone who’s ever been in a raiding guild will tell you about the completely inept people who somehow wormed their way through the system.

So, I don’t agree with this theory. Maybe we could rephrase it as:

Be honest with yourself and decide, is it better to have a high level character quickly that anyone can create and achieve (even the stupid and inept) or high level quickly in a system where it takes strategy, planning and skill to get there.

Only to the first wave of people in a given game will the death penalty really matter in this context.

This discussion isn’t over! Stick around for the next part of the extremely engaging series: Death in the RPG!