Perfil de EverQuest 2

One Comment - "EverQuest 2"

1. Saba 23/11/2015 a las 02:18 -

   I started MMOs with WoW, so that may have coeorld my experience somewhat. The WoW death penalty became the baseline along which I judged other MMOs. When I started GW, for example, I was annoyed at the performance/morale penalty it applied, but appreciated that I could keep forging on ahead if I needed to, or I could otherwise restart the instance to return to normal. The downside of GW’s penalty is that you can basically zerg the hell out of the instance if you like; if you keep throwing yourself back in to the fight, you will eventually win through stubborness instead of tractics.In EQ2, I didn’t notice much difference from WoW, except for the small fact that having to run back to where you died to return to the action was a bit of a pain. The experience penalty was small, and somewhat less annoying than I might otherwise have thought, largely because the experience gains in game were already very large, and you could also accumulate rest-state experence (or something similar, I forget now).The nicest death penalty yet seems to be in LOTRO, where you get some little temporary wound effect and a bit of equipment damage. Like EQ2, you need to run back if you want, but it definitely seems more subdued than all the other MMOs I’ve tried.The one game which irritates me the most (that I enjoy playing) is DDO: In D&D Online you get penalized three ways: first, you die and if your party wipes or your solo, you can not rez at a waypoint in the dungeon, so you are teleported out to a tavern where you need to spend a couple minutes in recovery (time penalty). Then you suffer experience loss, which really, really annoys me because loss of experience means a bigger time penalty: you lose the time spent earning that experience, then you lose more time spent recovering that experience. Finally, #3: You re-enter the dungeon and the overall value of the adventure drops by 10% per re-entry. Which means your precious time spent in the dungeon just got de-valued. So, as a casual player who solos at least 60% of the time, it means that I feel like I’m treading water in DDO, which is terrible because I love this game’s play and structure more than any other MMO right now. Interestingly, I noticed in the notes on the upcoming January 30th expansion that they are eliminating the death penalty for experience. Probably not the re-entry penalty, I bet, but I can live with that, since the re-entry penalty is to control players exiting the dungeon to reload, as it were. But this little change they are implementing has saved my subscription; I’ve started and cancelled my DDO subscription 4 times since the game was released, and each time was due to increasing frustration at the treadmill the death penalty placed me on. Now, at last, I think they’ll be keeping me if they follow through with the new update.As an old-school paper and pencil gamer (I started with D&D in 1980) the idea of perma-death seems natural .to tabletop gaming. Partly because an organic GM can make decisions about events that a PC game can not, and partly because things move more slowly in person-to-person games, and the overall experience is far different from CRPGS and MMOs. If the purpose of a death penalty is punishment, then it needs to be seriously re-evaluated. If the purpose of the death penalty is to provide challenge (another way of saying encourage you to stay alive to avoid punishment ) then maybe games could make sliding-scale death penalties, or servers designed with specific death penalties an option for players who want them. As I see it, the only really viable function of the death penalty in a game should be to limit the usefulness of the specific character in the situation which caused death; put another way, it’s a very mild way of simulating the fact that the PC should be out of commission in the battle at hand, unless a legitimate means (like rezzing) is ued to bring him back. This creates a mild penalty, one in which the character’s usefulness to that situation is at an end, forcing the rest of the party to carry on until the dead guy can hike on back for a later encounter.In tabletop gaming, death doesn’t happen all that often, but it’s usually permanent, except at high levels of play (when it’s nice to have your character brought back after all the time spent playing it). The penalty for death is making a new character and waiting for your GM to re-introduce you. But in a typical tabletop D&D game, for example, you might have 2-4 fights over the course of an evening’s play. Now, in four hours of online play, you might have 20-40 fights, easily, with twice as many opponents. Mathematically, you are going to die .a lot more often. If a game wants to simulate death more accurately with strong penalties or perma-death, I think it would work better if the rest of the game also simulated reality a little more accurately, with a game system that did not have level-base disparities in play like WoW or EQ2 (or almost all other games on the market) where just wandering over the wrong hill or through the wrong portal could mean instant and inescapable death from unkillable baddies.Just some thoughts .great article, btw!