Reward not dying

[Aschbart]

I didn't want to post this in any of the dead-horse-beating threads about death-penalties, since I am to suggest a completely different solution to the same problem.

Instead of re-introducing death penalties, introduce a survivalist bonus to XP! Something like this: everytime you complete a quest that you get XP for (i. e. at around your level or higher), you get a tiny but cumulative bonus to your XP. This bonus can accumulate to a limit, say 5%, or maybe even as much as 10%. However, if you die within a quest, your bonus gets reduced, or even reset to 0.

Like a 'death penalty', this would cause most players to play smarter. but unlike the penalty, it wouldn't aggaravate players who are against such a penalty.

Turbine used Bonus-XP weekends to lure players into playing more. Could we use the same lure to make players play smarter?

[Gkar]

You need to read your quest xp breakdown more carefully.

You already get a 10% bonus for not dying.

(Or maybe you just die too much to have noticed lol)

[AyumiAmakusa]

I didn't want to post this in any of the dead-horse-beating threads about death-penalties, since I am to suggest a completely different solution to the same problem.

Instead of re-introducing death penalties, introduce a survivalist bonus to XP! Something like this: everytime you complete a quest that you get XP for (i. e. at around your level or higher), you get a tiny but cumulative bonus to your XP. This bonus can accumulate to a limit, say 5%, or maybe even as much as 10%. However, if you die within a quest, your bonus gets reduced, or even reset to 0.

Like a 'death penalty', this would cause most players to play smarter. but unlike the penalty, it wouldn't aggaravate players who are against such a penalty.

Turbine used Bonus-XP weekends to lure players into playing more. Could we use the same lure to make players play smarter?

It's called the Flawless Victory Bonus.

EDIT: Perhaps I should explain more on why your idea isn't good. Say it IS cumulative, then can I not run Haverdasher 10 times to get the maximum cumulative xp and then run a level 20 quest? Would jumping off the Harbor ramp be considered a death? PvP deaths? If you introduce scaling with quests as well (such as a level 15 cannot get the cumulative xp from lvl 9 and below quests), can I still not run a very easy quest just to max out the cumulative xp?

[Tholar]

Would really cut down on people running the shroud.

[Rumbaar]

Would really cut down on people running the shroud.

Who runs shroud for XP?

[Aschbart]

You need to read your quest xp breakdown more carefully.

You already get a 10% bonus for not dying.

(Or maybe you just die too much to have noticed lol)

I know that, and in fact take care to actually get it. My point is that it's a bonus that carries over indefinitely! Or as long as you remain careful.

[Aschbart]

It's called the Flawless Victory Bonus.

EDIT: Perhaps I should explain more on why your idea isn't good. Say it IS cumulative, then can I not run Haverdasher 10 times to get the maximum cumulative xp and then run a level 20 quest?

No you couldn't, like I said it has to be a quest that gives XP and is around your level. You have a point though: repeating an easy quest too often shouldn't stack that bonus, so I'd say the bonus being awarded will be proportional to the modified base % for the quest, meaning that a penalty for running it too often will carry over to the bonus being awarded.

P.S.: Anyway, the intention (at least my intention), is to give *new* players an incentive (or yet another incentive) to play smarter. If these players understand it so well to actually think of possible abuses, then that means they are caring about their XP and don't want to upset their bonus - goal achieved!

[toughguyjoe]

I know that, and in fact take care to actually get it. My point is that it's a bonus that carries over indefinitely! Or as long as you remain careful.

Remove Flawless Victory and then just change it to a personal Survival bonus.

Instead of having it be a party wide thing make it just personal. both the re-entry one and the death one. If I die, I lose 10%. No one else but me. When I reenter, i lose 30%, 10% for the "I never reentered" bonus and 20% for reentering.

A bonus that carries over indefinitely is sort of silly. With the Guild XP shrines, Xp pots, how easy does leveling up need to be?

[h4x0r1f1c]

How about making it so if some idiot dies it doesn't affect your XP bonus?

Party members dying makes bad pug reviews and thus sad times poking through the LFM.

[donfilibuster]

On a world with free raise dead no one is afraid of death, playing smart would not be the norm.
Perhaps the soul binders shouldn't work for free, on top of the repair cost on releasing.
Toon respawning and other issues like no friendly fire and item wear, all owe to mmo simplification.

[Aschbart]

Remove Flawless Victory and then just change it to a personal Survival bonus.

Instead of having it be a party wide thing make it just personal. both the re-entry one and the death one. If I die, I lose 10%. No one else but me. When I reenter, i lose 30%, 10% for the "I never reentered" bonus and 20% for reentering.

A bonus that carries over indefinitely is sort of silly. With the Guild XP shrines, Xp pots, how easy does leveling up need to be?

I agree that leveling needs no further helping. But that is not my point. Nor 'fixing' XP bonuses/penalties that apply to just one quest.

My experience with PUGs is that many players are of a mindset to get over with the quest as fast as possible, no matter how much they know about it. Just about no one will ever expect to get flawless victory. Some players even seem to think 'the faster we get through the less people die'. Causality gets turned on it's head, people die, and the quest takes longer and longer instead...

Now, not everyone PUGs all of the time, and if a player's reckless behaviour in his last PUG run carries over to his soloing, which he might be more careful with, then it suddenly does make a difference just about how careless he was in that PUG.

Maybe my suggestion of a persistent XP bonus isn't the best way to achieve what I intended, but I am convinced a reward of some kind for surviving would be more efficient than a penalty. The flawless victory bonus is there, but it's so hard to get a good PUG that actually gets it, hardly anyone *expects* to get it - and therefore nobody takes special care to not be the one messing it up. But if there were a bonus only tied to your personal survival, then it's in your hand (mostly), to actually benefit from it.

[parvo]

Nothing will incent the dumb player to be smarter. They'll flood the forums like a pack of wild sheep following the "why should this game be so hard" threads. Turbine has decided it's much better business to incent the smart player to play dumb. Every mod and every update has made this game easier and it will continue like that until the average single-celled organism can cap and proclaim themselves hero of Stormreach. Here's hoping Turb will add server wide spam again with the proclamation every time it happens.

Howabout segregating players by server. Players who die a lot will have forced transfers to Khyber. Players who don't die a lot go to Thelanis. Everyone else falls between them somewhere. Stop dying and your character will move too.

[Aschbart]

On a world with free raise dead no one is afraid of death, playing smart would not be the norm.
Perhaps the soul binders shouldn't work for free, on top of the repair cost on releasing.
Toon respawning and other issues like no friendly fire and item wear, all owe to mmo simplification.

Whether the raise is free or comes at a GP cost is mostly academic in a game where inflation already destroyed economy years ago. Introducing steep prices will probably weed out many of the bad players, but also many of the good new players, who don't want to be doubly penalized, by inflationary AH prices as well as NPC services, when they've just started playing and never got a chance to assemble the riches required to get a moderately agreeable equipment.

In PnP, when we had a character death at low levels, we couldn't afford the steep price for a raise. Our DM then had the NPC priest offer a raise in return for accomplishing a quest for his church. Maybe such an approach would work, i. e. for a Spirit Binder to agree raising your spirit, you'd first have to accomplish a quest for him. Yet I don't see how such an approach would fix the issue I was aiming for, the carelessness of some players!

[Aschbart]

Nothing will incent the dumb player to be smarter. They'll flood the forums like a pack of wild sheep following the "why should this game be so hard" threads.

Are you saying they'll complain for getting a bonus? I'd say players as dumb as that get sorted out at the character generation screen and will never ever find a link to the forums to start with.

If you didn't notice, I didn't suggest a death penalty, I suggested a reward.

I'm not even going to address the segregation. The word alone makes me flinch!

[donfilibuster]

In PnP, when we had a character death at low levels, we couldn't afford the steep price for a raise. Our DM then had the NPC priest offer a raise in return for accomplishing a quest for his church. Maybe such an approach would work, i. e. for a Spirit Binder to agree raising your spirit, you'd first have to accomplish a quest for him. Yet I don't see how such an approach would fix the issue I was aiming for, the carelessness of some players!

Good idea, perhaps the said quest would give tokens to use the shrines or something.
As for the issue, maybe having to come prepared will make the careless take interest on cure potions and such.

The whole thing reminds me of Ghostwalk, where you could be raised on special locations without penalty.
The cost came in the form of having to wander to them just like ddo souls walk to the shrines, but your ghost could be killed separately.

[Uska]

I know that, and in fact take care to actually get it. My point is that it's a bonus that carries over indefinitely! Or as long as you remain careful.

Way to easy to expoit you just run easy quests until your bonus is maxed then run a high xp quest bang.. no this isnt a needed idea.

[Daliyn]

I like the idea of some survival bonus carrying over through the leveling process. I've already seen something like that in other games, though they were not MMOs. Though it doesn't have to be an XP bonus. How about a slight boost to dropchances when reaching a certain bonus? Or reduced vendor prices? Or special items you just can't use when you die in every quest? I'm sure, if such a perk is useful, it would make people play smarter. Of course, it would be hard to find the balance between reward for clever gameplay and punishment for the inevitable 1 on a roll.

The idea to make death penalties personal and not groupwide is another good one, though a different story.

[Zachski]

Way to easy to expoit you just run easy quests until your bonus is maxed then run a high xp quest bang.. no this isnt a needed idea.

Easy quests don't give nearly as much bonus (and it's capped much much MUCH lower) as an average or hard quest. Problem solved.

Actually, I have an idea. Nevermind, it's a bad idea.

[Chai]

Nothing will incent the dumb player to be smarter. They'll flood the forums like a pack of wild sheep following the "why should this game be so hard" threads. Turbine has decided it's much better business to incent the smart player to play dumb. Every mod and every update has made this game easier and it will continue like that until the average single-celled organism can cap and proclaim themselves hero of Stormreach. Here's hoping Turb will add server wide spam again with the proclamation every time it happens.

Bwahahahahaharrr. *cough* Up to here I agree with you.

Howabout segregating players by server. Players who die a lot will have forced transfers to Khyber. Players who don't die a lot go to Thelanis. Everyone else falls between them somewhere. Stop dying and your character will move too.

I know youre being sarcastic here, but still, I am not for having a pixelated class war based on how many times the game rolled a 1 for me while generating a "random" number between 1 and 20 to see if I save -vs- grenis smackdwn syndrome.

To the entire thread:

I think the bonus for not dying is just fine as it is. D&D is a group forced co-operation game. If your group survives, then the group gets 10%. Yeah, we know its always some other idiots fault when we dont get our 10% because we never die right?

[Chai]

Are you saying they'll complain for getting a bonus? I'd say players as dumb as that get sorted out at the character generation screen and will never ever find a link to the forums to start with.

If you didn't notice, I didn't suggest a death penalty, I suggested a reward.

I'm not even going to address the segregation. The word alone makes me flinch!

No, I think he is remembering the eleventy bajillion or so threads that started off with "ZOMG this game isnt solo friendly why is it so hard?!!" that happened back in the day.

People complained up a storm that the game was too hard a few years ago, and look at where that got us. I am surprised the stairs in every quest dont have a baby gate on them and the mobs dont get sent out with their hands tied behind their backs at this point.

Dont get me wrong, I think your suggestion has merrit. Players just see it going the other way in reality. Instead of inciting players to play smart, they are making it easier for them to not play smart and still succeed.