That's not actually what Vega asked for, they asked for "numbers and data" .
Responding to such by digging out those comments is a waste of my time because they would then be dismissed as not "numbers and data". However, now the request has been made the comment is made in the OP of this topic https://forums.lusternia.com/discussion/3680/timequakes-and-thank-yous
If you like, here are some other examples that would indicate MMOs as a genre have moved away from experience loss as a mechanism.
FFXI has experience loss on death. With the cross over of dev teams, however, the devs that transferred from it to FFXIV decided to remove exp loss as a concept from the new game. Presumably if it was a good mechanic, it would have been kept. (FFXI also has complaints popping up about exp loss causing people to drop below their gears minimum level, increasing the negative aspect of dying because they have to then go find gear to gain the exp to be able to use their gear again)
Looking across google results for MMO... SWTOR, Secret World Legends, LOTRO, ESO, TERA, Skyforge, Blade & Soul, Rift, Star Trek Online, Runescape... all lack experience punishments for death.
The only games I've seen at a glance that have exp loss on death are:
Archeage, however, PvP is a specific exception so doesn't incur exp loss. My understanding though is this is an exp tax, not an actual loss. (This variation means you can't lose a level to the loss)
Black Desert Online is similar to Archeage (not an exp tax though), except that there's a system "karma" which tracks player actions so if you're intentionally bad and break certain laws you can get a flag that does cause you to lose exp on PvP deaths.
Vega's comments about pvp in current Tera aren't surprising though also not super relevant here because I don't think anyone's talking about restricting open world PvP? (It's not surprising because a group of about 15 of my friends all jumped on at once and high level characters AOE one-shotting groups of lowbies at progression choke points was pretty common, the only counter play to this was having an even higher level friend turn up which isn't an option for everyone)
My point is that I don't think that pvp and losses related to it are relevant to longevity of games. People who want to pvp will do so.
One thing of note that I am seeing in that thread is that it does not seem as though timequakes are the only available pvp aspect in that game. So I am unsure that making the ONLY factional pvp content free from exp loss an issue. As I said previously.
As players we don't have anything else to lose from caches, except crystals themselves on death if we take out xp loss, which losing crystals will do much more hinder non-combatants than 20 minutes of bashing. In fact there is nothing a player loses from not being 75.99 xp. Absolutely nothing aside from dropping a bit in the rankings.
And I honestly do not believe that making caches have no xp loss will magically increase the amount of players.
Furthermore in Tera if you die in pvp you lose crystals which is far worse than losing exp, and it would be the equivalent of us losing mods on death. So at what point does this make doing caches worth aside from Crystals if you take out exp penalties. I can't think of anything they could restrict that would not encourage non-combatants from being hunting the second they left the cache to make sure they won't turn in crystals. Which at that point, they'd lose experience. FFXI and FFXIV don't have any relevant pvp. Skyforge is a crash grab game, and Blade and Soul lose all incentive to do any pvp outside of arenas. The fact of the matter is that the games listed in the non-xp loss category either aren't focused on pvp at all or shifted to less xp focus, or they are more focused on being esports game ala Blade and Soul championships.
The last time a cache discussion came up it was argued that the marks were too high and if only it wasn't so expensive more people would do Caches. The Admins changed it and nothing happened numbers wise. The only changes in participation were based on people being willing to take people and teach them.
Your argumentation basically boils down to, 'Xp loss is antiquated and should be removed to the game'.
Talking about MMOS at ALL was a pointless tangent and you're only now bringing it up?
Even during skirmishes newbies in SM still get one shot by aoes if they walk into a fight, so I don't think it matters. By removing xp loss guards become even more useless since there is no reason to not do overly aggressive things, whereas before you would at least have to weigh costs. Because that is essentially where this conversation is going, if losing xp for doing objectives is 'bad' then there is no reason to lose xp for anything else since everything else is worth far less.
Rather than focusing on xp being the reason, because honestly I think not feeling comfortable with one's class is a much larger factor, there are so many ways for people to feel useful to their factions.
CACs for example. Yet, not many people do them.
I wouldn't even care if caches lost xp loss IF there were other facets to Factional pvp. Which is the key component here.
There are so many aspects of the game that allow people to help their factions, and this particular one needs to be neutered to allow people who won't continue doing it to do it, without taking into consideration the majority of people who do.
Character: Vega Faction: Song Dominion Class: Engineer
note: I am always up for RP, antagonistic or friendly. If she's being a bitch, it's because you're from Scatterhome or she's trying to meet a deadline and has nothing to do with whether I want to RP with you or not. Thanks in advance for the RP!
Yep, timequakes aren't the only PvP system in Lusternia and they were introduced as they are to get players engaged in PvP who were put off by the potential risks (which looks to be literally just exp loss) which is a goal they've apparently achieved. And following that, when the death buff needed updating it was modified to prevent exp loss from death.
The people that were PvPing before participate, so do new people. It seems like the PvPers are happy because they have more people to fight with/against, the people that were hesitant are more willing to dive in because the risk was holding them back, so doing the thing you seem convinced won't help has apparently helped.
It's all relatively simple, negative feedback loops like exp loss are a game design tool used to discourage certain behaviours, people who consistently hit those negative loops are likely to become averse to engaging with the activities that cause those loops (i.e a reluctance to participate in pvp). Some people are more or less affected by them because psychology, it's similar to the framing around rested xp people react negatively to negative things and postive to positive things (even if they're literally the same thing with just different labels).
At the end of the day, what choices other games have made provides insight, MMOs are really the closest game genre MUDs so their learnings can be handy. (i.e WoW moving away from a negatively framed mechanic)
Cause yeah, otherwise people are just debating their thoughts and personal preferences, which will always trend towards maintaining the status quo because the people who don't like that are more likely to have left.
People who will do PvP will do PvP regardless of whether they get xp penalties or not.
However, if they get punished too much for it then they'll start burning out, play less, and eventually quit. I speak from personal experience here, both semi-recent and years old.
Reduction of pvp penalties isn't about getting new people interested, it's about keeping the old playerbase without frustrating them.
BTW I still believe you can have a fun and challenging time without risking anything. I brought up the sports example but even if you keep it in the realm of video games: imagine if losing a game of Overwatch or Age of Empires 2 had you lose something outside the context of that single, specific match. If losing a game of Hearthstone had you not only lose a star of ranking (which is fine because ranking only exists to rate players) but also lose gold. It'd be ridiculous. Yet somehow losing exp and/or marks in pvp is not only fine but mandatory in this game because "it adds risk".
I don't need risk. Playing a video game is an exchange - I contribute time, I get fun. If I get frustration or lose something instead, then that diminishes my fun. This is fine only if your time is worthless, and mine isn't. Simple enough.
Death timers can be countered with heart-starting, and xp loss is the only reason heartstarting isn't constantly spammed. But if you want to turn pvp into a match of 'which faction has the most Engineers' which will end up with us being back on the forums arguing about how to get more people willing to go Engineer into other factions.
Which at that point if we have no xp loss, does that not mean the only solution would be to not have heartstart work in pvp situations?
The interaction between a death timer and heart-starting isn't actually known.
But it IS known. HETE's cloning process is the game's death timer. It doesn't increase per death in a short time, but it is a death timer. Heartstart interrupts that death timer. That's half the point of the ability (and the other half is to go even further, having the player back in the fight immediately).
The scenarios you described can already be achieved the way things are. Do you see them happening? I know I don't.
Also, I don't know how much you think an INR would sell for, but I think you're highly overestimating the amount. If you want marks, it's probably faster to do hard incursions than the way you suggest. But hey, feel free to have your character kill himself over and over to find out. Let us know how it turns out.
The issue is that removing the costs of death entirely trivializes death, or incentivizes schemes to abuse no-cost death, or both. The original post is about removing barriers to caches, a group pvp environment so that more people can participate worry-free in dangerous pvp. Removing experience loss from death entirely, on the other hand, without removing the corresponding experience gain from scanning an INR creates an undeserved windfall to anyone who scans it. INRs, then, become experience gained for only some marks. If the death occurs in a cache, then the cost in marks of a level 75 player is under 200 marks (because the cost of death in a cache is reduced). If all it takes is a visit to HETE to generate, what, 3% experience for a leveling player without any genuine experience-generating activity, then that is a fundamentally flawed system. That is why I disagreed with your proposed remedy to the problem identified in the original post.
I have made not made any "ridiculous statement."
Alright, that's fair. Sorry, I misunderstood your original post. I thought you were saying that people would basically offer themselves as sacrifice to novices so they would level up faster. That was the 'ridiculous statement' I was refering to.
Anyway, if we're to keep losing xp on death then I'd recommend giving us the option to get xp bonus to recoup the loss faster. There is enough grinding in SM (you can basically find it in every aspect of the game) and by its nature, grinding is-not- fun. I'm all for making it so people get to max level faster and can then experience the full game more quickly.
My suggestion is to increase the xp gain from kills within free PK areas, and to remove xp loss/INR drop on deaths in free PK.
I used to think that xp loss didn't matter, and that it wouldn't have any real bearing on who participated in PK. Then I played in Aetolia for a little bit, where there is no xp loss in their main conflict event. There were definitely people who would only participate in the free-death pvp, and then would pass on playing in the xp-loss pvp. This wasn't just an observation, but it was verbalized by those people. Sairys touched on this, but I agree, there is psychology involved. People are risk-averse when there is the perception that something can be be lost, but the same risk is acceptable when there is a perception that something can be gained.
If you increase the kill XP and remove death loss, participants will still risk feeding xp to the enemy, but it will be more palatable to try when they themselves have nothing to lose. And actually in Aetolia, I think the xp scales with your level, so it encourages young people to try because they can actually gain a lot from it, even if they're likely to get smacked hard. There are still times when people will quit or not bother, because they don't want to feed, but at least the option is always benign.
Instituting this change would also solve another issue I've had here, in that I don't think you should have to wait for INRs to unlock when they're earned in PK events. I get that some people enjoy trying to RP or gank after caches to get their INR back, but to me this always just feels like harassment. Running around while they unlock or having to sit guarded with your friends after the cache isn't very fun.
I think we will get more raiding objectives or direct factional conflict in the future, and maybe those you'll still drop INR. But for what we've got, I think the population would benefit from no xp/supply loss in caches/CPs. This is probably contingent on giving more value to crystals, in either making CPs more competitive to hold and/or in giving a purpose to crystals above the faction limit.
Anyway, if we're to keep losing xp on death then I'd recommend giving us the option to get xp bonus to recoup the loss faster. There is enough grinding in SM (you can basically find it in every aspect of the game) and by its nature, grinding is-not- fun. I'm all for making it so people get to max level faster and can then experience the full game more quickly.
I don't think that tinkering with loss on death is going to make a meaningful difference for how long it takes to level. In short, I think changing death mechanics would only be a drop in the bucket, and looking at death mechanics solely for the purpose of leveling is looking at the situation too narrowly. There's also the PVP context to consider, for instance (which I won't really go into, but I will say that having junk drop on death is an incentive for PVP; when talking about PVP in the open world, it should be born in mind that there are rules about when it's permissible and when it's not). Furthermore, there are other options in place to accelerate experience gain.
Given that % of experience till next level is an approximation, scanning the INR appears to restore most of the experience. Therefore, if you get your INR back and scan it, you recover most of the experience. That means death causes the following to happen: 1) you die. 2) you drop any junk items you're carrying, which anyone can pick up (though it's not that common today for people to stumble across and take that junk). 3) you wait a little bit to respawn. 4) you respawn, which costs marks depending on your level. 5) you may have to do some upkeep things because you died, such as nanoseer defenses or engineer bot maintenance.
If you go back to where you were, get your junk, and get your INR, what are you really missing in the leveling context? Time and the relevant opportunity cost, mostly. The experience loss from the death itself is minimal; losing out on the time from dying which you could be spending gaining more experience is the main loss. Losing the marks from recloning is an irritating reminder to be more careful (which might mean going someplace else), and this may be offset by the junk you've gathered so far.
Messing with loss on death isn't really going to make a meaningful impact on the time it takes to level. There are other things in place to help decrease the total time to level that make a significant difference, such as: experience booster chips; the experience boost from hunting with a higher level player; the IRE subscription; two artifacts that boost experience gained on alts (which probably doesn't help); and the good old fashioned method of hunting in the best places, doing the best quests, and so on.
The thing that helped me the most to get through the level 75 grind was to remember that there were other parts of the game that I could engage without having to be max level, such as RP, ships, and hacking. I also particularly enjoyed the smaller things like xenozoology and performance.
My suggestion is to increase the xp gain from kills within free PK areas, and to remove xp loss/INR drop on deaths in free PK.
[...]
Instituting this change would also solve another issue I've had here, in that I don't think you should have to wait for INRs to unlock when they're earned in PK events. I get that some people enjoy trying to RP or gank after caches to get their INR back, but to me this always just feels like harassment. Running around while they unlock or having to sit guarded with your friends after the cache isn't very fun.
I also agree that waiting on INRs to unlock is a really tedious mechanic when it comes to PVP. Here's a different solution to that:
What if we dramatically reduce or entirely remove the unlocking wait and instead institute a 30s or 1 min channel to unlock and use another player's INR (like the one for harvesting a crystal)? This way, if there's a total victory, the victor can take a moment to use the INR and that's that -- no long wait. In 1v1, that would mean that one fight is it, but in a group fight, it's still a lot like what we have now but without the hassle at the end.
Comments
Responding to such by digging out those comments is a waste of my time because they would then be dismissed as not "numbers and data". However, now the request has been made the comment is made in the OP of this topic https://forums.lusternia.com/discussion/3680/timequakes-and-thank-yous
If you like, here are some other examples that would indicate MMOs as a genre have moved away from experience loss as a mechanism.
The only games I've seen at a glance that have exp loss on death are:
- Archeage, however, PvP is a specific exception so doesn't incur exp loss. My understanding though is this is an exp tax, not an actual loss. (This variation means you can't lose a level to the loss)
- Black Desert Online is similar to Archeage (not an exp tax though), except that there's a system "karma" which tracks player actions so if you're intentionally bad and break certain laws you can get a flag that does cause you to lose exp on PvP deaths.
Vega's comments about pvp in current Tera aren't surprising though also not super relevant here because I don't think anyone's talking about restricting open world PvP? (It's not surprising because a group of about 15 of my friends all jumped on at once and high level characters AOE one-shotting groups of lowbies at progression choke points was pretty common, the only counter play to this was having an even higher level friend turn up which isn't an option for everyone)One thing of note that I am seeing in that thread is that it does not seem as though timequakes are the only available pvp aspect in that game. So I am unsure that making the ONLY factional pvp content free from exp loss an issue. As I said previously.
As players we don't have anything else to lose from caches, except crystals themselves on death if we take out xp loss, which losing crystals will do much more hinder non-combatants than 20 minutes of bashing. In fact there is nothing a player loses from not being 75.99 xp. Absolutely nothing aside from dropping a bit in the rankings.
And I honestly do not believe that making caches have no xp loss will magically increase the amount of players.
Furthermore in Tera if you die in pvp you lose crystals which is far worse than losing exp, and it would be the equivalent of us losing mods on death. So at what point does this make doing caches worth aside from Crystals if you take out exp penalties. I can't think of anything they could restrict that would not encourage non-combatants from being hunting the second they left the cache to make sure they won't turn in crystals. Which at that point, they'd lose experience. FFXI and FFXIV don't have any relevant pvp. Skyforge is a crash grab game, and Blade and Soul lose all incentive to do any pvp outside of arenas. The fact of the matter is that the games listed in the non-xp loss category either aren't focused on pvp at all or shifted to less xp focus, or they are more focused on being esports game ala Blade and Soul championships.
The last time a cache discussion came up it was argued that the marks were too high and if only it wasn't so expensive more people would do Caches. The Admins changed it and nothing happened numbers wise. The only changes in participation were based on people being willing to take people and teach them.
Your argumentation basically boils down to, 'Xp loss is antiquated and should be removed to the game'.
Talking about MMOS at ALL was a pointless tangent and you're only now bringing it up?
Even during skirmishes newbies in SM still get one shot by aoes if they walk into a fight, so I don't think it matters. By removing xp loss guards become even more useless since there is no reason to not do overly aggressive things, whereas before you would at least have to weigh costs. Because that is essentially where this conversation is going, if losing xp for doing objectives is 'bad' then there is no reason to lose xp for anything else since everything else is worth far less.
Rather than focusing on xp being the reason, because honestly I think not feeling comfortable with one's class is a much larger factor, there are so many ways for people to feel useful to their factions.
CACs for example. Yet, not many people do them.
I wouldn't even care if caches lost xp loss IF there were other facets to Factional pvp. Which is the key component here.
There are so many aspects of the game that allow people to help their factions, and this particular one needs to be neutered to allow people who won't continue doing it to do it, without taking into consideration the majority of people who do.
Faction: Song Dominion
Class: Engineer
The people that were PvPing before participate, so do new people. It seems like the PvPers are happy because they have more people to fight with/against, the people that were hesitant are more willing to dive in because the risk was holding them back, so doing the thing you seem convinced won't help has apparently helped.
It's all relatively simple, negative feedback loops like exp loss are a game design tool used to discourage certain behaviours, people who consistently hit those negative loops are likely to become averse to engaging with the activities that cause those loops (i.e a reluctance to participate in pvp). Some people are more or less affected by them because psychology, it's similar to the framing around rested xp people react negatively to negative things and postive to positive things (even if they're literally the same thing with just different labels).
At the end of the day, what choices other games have made provides insight, MMOs are really the closest game genre MUDs so their learnings can be handy. (i.e WoW moving away from a negatively framed mechanic)
Cause yeah, otherwise people are just debating their thoughts and personal preferences, which will always trend towards maintaining the status quo because the people who don't like that are more likely to have left.
But it IS known. HETE's cloning process is the game's death timer. It doesn't increase per death in a short time, but it is a death timer. Heartstart interrupts that death timer. That's half the point of the ability (and the other half is to go even further, having the player back in the fight immediately).
Anyway, if we're to keep losing xp on death then I'd recommend giving us the option to get xp bonus to recoup the loss faster. There is enough grinding in SM (you can basically find it in every aspect of the game) and by its nature, grinding is-not- fun. I'm all for making it so people get to max level faster and can then experience the full game more quickly.
I think we will get more raiding objectives or direct factional conflict in the future, and maybe those you'll still drop INR. But for what we've got, I think the population would benefit from no xp/supply loss in caches/CPs. This is probably contingent on giving more value to crystals, in either making CPs more competitive to hold and/or in giving a purpose to crystals above the faction limit.