by Avatar » Fri Sep 18, 2009 2:47 pm
I guess we'd all agree that there should be some negative aspects to dying. The bad part of all this is that the risk / impact are very spiky. You die while soloing, there are several possibilities that you may get raised and lose nothing. Even when corpsing, there are many times that you corpse, collect your eq, and you've lost some experience but its no big deal - you recover that xp with little effort. Then there are the other times - the third time I leveled up Avatar I lost my second 40 twice in one week. That was back before SS was a continent, so the xp per hour was much lower than it's become since. So the chance of a large penalty is relatively low, but when you hit that small chance the penalty can be very large.
We've all seen these trends where you lose concentration 5 times in a row. That can happen to players too where they lose levels 5 deaths in a row. In a sense, it's fair because we're all taking the same chance, but in another sense it really sucks when that's you hitting the pavement.
Many parts of Sloth are designed this way. Forges are the same way, I guess we'd all agree that there's a really low chance of blowing a forge, but for the person who finally does - it sucks hard. Again, I failed a glimmering sleeves and a ring of the serpents within days of each other.
I guess I'd argue that the we should smooth that curve a little. I guess the spikiness (low rate, huge impact) is a game-design decision. Or rather, it's probably an unplanned artifact and not the result of any consistent plan.
Also, the xp loss seems to be based on how many xps are currently carried? We might have new methods available now (Top-20 lists suggest we track xp's over time). Maybe it makes more sense to sum the xp gain over the last 30 days and divide by 30 to determine potential xp loss (these are just arbitrary numbers, to show an example). So we could theoretically pick an amount of days worth of experience that you lose when you die. We could also reduce the effect of the RNG. It's nice to have some random factor, but this could be x base + y random, and the random part could be a smaller part of the equation.
Charles
PS this may be unpopular, but I also think there should be some xp loss when you're successfully raised. This should be a smaller fraction, but there should be some consistent penalty in addition to the chance of a shock.