In the same vein as "List your top three wishes" in this thread I propose a listing from the players on their ideas on what an appropriate death penalty would be....if any. A straw poll for the developers. A quick sentence. Collect them here for developer consideration.
Keep it the way it is and have none. I swear a death penalty to entice you from not playing badly is like needing the threat of damnation to keep you from doing bad things. Any form of death penalty is masochistic by design and I'm not into that stuff :P
If there is a death 'penalty' - do it like a first player game and restart from beginning of that section of the mission with all the enemies respawned.
If the mobs don't respawn, a repair bill per death works. Just makes you less likely to keep throwing yourself at your target without any more thought than "Hulk SMASH!!!!" Decrease max hull points by 10% per death, repairable only at a starbase or by a science vessel with a specialized Engineering team (make them a common NPC-type item that drops like Shield Batteries). People would have more use for the support classes/ships, and tanks ... er ... cruisers, would be able to fill their designated roles. This wouldn't preclude anyone from participating in any sort of event, PvE or PvP, but would encourage people to play rather than face-mash the keys. It also would have zero impact on solo PvE missions, because unless you have less physical dexterity than Stephen Hawking, you simply can't lose that many times to bots.
Each death should remove 10% of your crew until you return to a Starbase to replenish them... it is not severe but it does mean endlessly respawning will eventually make your ship untenable in a given fight.
A mild death penalty that would work on both ground and space is simply lock out a player's BO and Personal Abilities for 5 minutes each death(stacking debuff). They can still rush back in but will be limited to basic weapons.
Each death should remove 10% of your crew until you return to a Starbase to replenish them... it is not severe but it does mean endlessly respawning will eventually make your ship untenable in a given fight.
i like your idea. i thought a percentage of your energy credits..like in GTA. needs something.
If you die, the mob spawn you were fighting respawns and fully heals, but mob spawns you have already defeated remain dead. If you are in a group, you cannot respawn until your group is out of combat. These mechanics are intended to discourage 'zerg' tactics or players clearing content far above their intended level range.
You lose a small amount of crew upon death, a mild penalty that stacks to reduce your repair rate. This death penalty acts as a money sink, to curb inflation and to encourage players to take part in the economy.
Each death should remove 10% of your crew until you return to a Starbase to replenish them... it is not severe but it does mean endlessly respawning will eventually make your ship untenable in a given fight.
There you go and then no one can play any ship but Cruisers and the boarding party ability is useless. Hang up all escorts in particular, Teir 4 escorts have 50 crew.
Oh and when I take ZERO damage and half my crew is dead or incaped this system blows. I was fighting, used boarding party, took 3% hull damage and was down to ONE, thats right ONE injured crew member, the rest dead, I was 97% intact. Which is why they decided NOT to use this system, it would have been too difficult to fix.
It serves no purpose but to make you run back and forth, it is likely the WORST DP save for perma-death as it will take so log to fly back after each mission rebuy crew and fly back out to where you are, and for what? NOTHING what is that doing other then making me spend upwards of 10 minutes refiling my crew?
Maybe they need to lengthen the respawn timer for PvP, or just declare that once you're dead, you're out of that instance until it resets. But I see no particular advantage to changing the current system for PvE. If someone wants to zerg, let them zerg. It's no skin off my teeth.
My ideal death "penalty", at least for space combat, is the one in my sig.
Rather than take a penalty for dying, have them game kick you into a short minigame/mission that takes place aboard your own ship. These shouldn't take any more than 1-2 minutes to complete (assuming you rush through as quickly as you can). Additionally, have your derelict ship still floating in space, that allies can "revive" and end your "near death mission" prematurely as they essentially "revive" your ship. Derelicts could not be targeted by enemies (unrealistic but necessary). Regardless of how you come back (ship mission or friendly revive), you return to your ship where it was reduced to 0 hull, possibly at somewhat reduced strength (half or so shields/hull?) but with your officer's powers refreshed to fight off any enemies "camping" your ship.
On top of all that, I would have an option to "abandon ship" available at any time during the "near death mission". This would allow you to respawn immediately, but would carry a small but more permanent penalty, like crew loss, energy creds, or resetting the mission.
increase crew loss by 50%, 100% crew loss from death. increase travel times by 1000000% make crew replacements only available at sol starbase for 100kEC per five crew. BOFF death on ground has a 50% chance of perma death for that BOFF.
death in ground or space restarts the mission completely, with a 45 minute debuff which limits repair/travel speed, reduces weapon effectiveness by 50%.
also remove transwarp ability.
this would be a fair penalty which would separate the hardcore from the scrubs within a week.
as someone who finds this game slowing down to a grind due to repetitive content, I do not wish to make it even MORE repetitive with a silly unnecessary death penalty. For players/people who have lots of time to play and don't mind the grind and wasting your time repeating your progress, kudos. Find more games to play. However those of us working professionals who at most might get an hour or 2 every couple days, a death penalty is unacceptable.
There you go and then no one can play any ship but Cruisers and the boarding party ability is useless. Hang up all escorts in particular, Teir 4 escorts have 50 crew.
Oh and when I take ZERO damage and half my crew is dead or incaped this system blows. I was fighting, used boarding party, took 3% hull damage and was down to ONE, thats right ONE injured crew member, the rest dead, I was 97% intact. Which is why they decided NOT to use this system, it would have been too difficult to fix.
It serves no purpose but to make you run back and forth, it is likely the WORST DP save for perma-death as it will take so log to fly back after each mission rebuy crew and fly back out to where you are, and for what? NOTHING what is that doing other then making me spend upwards of 10 minutes refiling my crew?
In order to use crew loss as a penalty I think they'd have to have all crew "damage" come as a percentage of your maximum crew. Obviously a loss of 100 crew would cripple an escort but a cruiser could shrug it off completely.
This would give a form of economic advantage to escorts. You'd have to pay a lot less to replace your lost crewmen. In fact, it might even make it unfair to cruiser captains (if they have to pay 10x as much to replace the same percentage of their lost crew).
Permanent crew loss could work if it were tweaked properly. If they used the system it has now, though... it would be terrible.
Well, here's the problem with making the death penalty too stringent: Sometimes when you respawn in space, you get dumped into an area full of enemy ships - far away from any team mates.
Happened to me several time last night. I was in a region that was highly populated by enemy squadrons, and part of a four-ship team that was engaging a pretty heavily-armed set of opponents. I was one of the weaker vessels, and got creamed early. Respawned next to a DIFFERENT group of enemy, and they engaged me immediately, without giving me the opportunity to rejoin my group. In fact, it happened several times. I just sat back and let the ship get crushed repeatedly until I finally respawned somewhere near enough to enable me to rejoin my team.
If I had to suffer some sort of penalty, it would have been that much harder, and I probably would have bailed on the entire scenario.
OTOH, I do like the concept of a penalty. WoW handles it appropriately, I think - the need to "repair" your stuff occasionally.
Each death should remove 10% of your crew until you return to a Starbase to replenish them... it is not severe but it does mean endlessly respawning will eventually make your ship untenable in a given fight.
Will make Deep Space encounters unplayable in many circumstances. And don't give me the BS retort about "skilled" players. :rolleyes:
as someone who finds this game slowing down to a grind due to repetitive content, I do not wish to make it even MORE repetitive with a silly unnecessary death penalty. For players/people who have lots of time to play and don't mind the grind and wasting your time repeating your progress, kudos. Find more games to play. However those of us working professionals who at most might get an hour or 2 every couple days, a death penalty is unacceptable.
I am actually one such person, and this is why I very strongly want a system that keeps you playing when you "die". Make there be no penalty other than 1-2 minutes of playing "off mission". The idea is keep the game fun, but still giving motivation to do your best. You can then present the option of abandoning the "minigame", and take a small penalty, if that is more to someone's liking.
However those of us working professionals who at most might get an hour or 2 every couple days, a death penalty is unacceptable.
Please speak for yourself, I'm lucky if I play for 2 hours a day and I would like some sort of mild death penalty.
I have a couple ideas for a death penalty, but the most practical and middle ground one, imo, is simply resetting individual encounters, which I am 100% for.
My DP ideas though...
1) Have a system similar to CO's. It was one of the few things I actually liked about the game. Basically, you get stars that give you stat bonuses and make you stronger, and every time you die you lose a star. You would get these stars back by killing a number of mobs or completing missions.
2) Have some sort of durability system. Exploring new worlds and fighting with the Klingons naturally wears down your ship, and eventually you have to go to an actual station to get fully repaired. -10% for every death, and it wouldn't be too expensive. Simple, and not too much of a time sink.
I have one that's more crew related, but it would require a lot of changes that I know Cryptic won't bother with.
There should be NO death penalty. In fact, there shouldn't be death.
Ships should not explode when the hull reaches 0%. When below 5% hull the ship should be disabled and floating around. The player should have the choice to abandon ship and thus spawn outside the mission or wait for someone else to repair him.
When the whole group is disabled, you would have lost the mission and everything resets. If someone of the group is out of combat he should be able to repair disabled ships. If a group of enemies kills a player and drops out of combat it should reset its health.
Being able to FAIL missions is a definite must have for a meaningful endgame in this game.
I'm gonna play devils advocate and list some reason for keeping it the same
A: PVE what would be the point? Having a debuff or a timer associated with respawning seems a little foolish to go fight an npc. The only reason you could conceive of initiating one would be for fleet actions to prevent people from nuking the living daylights out of things and pulling agro to die and come back and do it again (prevents people from padding their dps for rewards)
B: PvP: lets say you have an increased respawn timer when you die x amount of times in a certain time period. In any space pvp battle you have one respawn point, if the timer keeps increasing it would then be possible for the opposing faction to focus on simply killing all their opponents to the point that do to the timer you have them all corralled at their respawn point, and then you just camp them while one guy goes around and caps all the points needed to win the game. Even with klingons and their ability to cloak and battle cloak, any half way intelligent federation group can simply torpedo spread or employ other aoe attacks to keep their opponents in place.
C:Klingons: Klingons at this point get a handful of quests on a daily basis, a lot of their lvling comes from pvping. It would seem counterproductive to say "hey go lvl through pvp, but by the way youre gonna have to sit for a period of time in pvp just waiting to respawn." It's not like they can say TRIBBLE it and go back to pve.
I disagree with a death penalty... I suck at games and I just want this game for fun where I seemingly have no limits. I don't die because I do "Hulk Smash," I die because I am not too good at strategy. If there were to be a death penalty, I would seriously stop playing. Yeah, I am aiming low, but honestly, my brain isn't made for stuff like this. I just want the Star Trek experience.
If your captain dies on the ground, then your character is deleted.
If your ship blows up in space, then your character is deleted.
This what you're looking for folks? Because anything less isn't a death penalty.
This trolling is why I avoid calling anything a "penalty". Perhaps I should remove the word "death" as well. I will make all future mentions of my ideas the "your ship was reduced to zero hull system". Or not.
i agree. furthermore, the game should lock and force you to buy a new copy and restart your sub from scratch and reinstall from new discs.
or even better force you to use a new computer or fresh install of windows to continue to play after in game death.
Why not take this to its logical extreme and invite the banhammer to hit you. Really, simply posting that you want no penalty for death is sufficient. Trolling threads about this serves no purpose.
This trolling is why I avoid calling anything a "penalty". Perhaps I should remove the word "death" as well. I will make all future mentions of my ideas the "your ship was reduced to zero hull system". Or not.
You could call it either a setback or an accident.
as someone who finds this game slowing down to a grind due to repetitive content, I do not wish to make it even MORE repetitive with a silly unnecessary death penalty. For players/people who have lots of time to play and don't mind the grind and wasting your time repeating your progress, kudos. Find more games to play. However those of us working professionals who at most might get an hour or 2 every couple days, a death penalty is unacceptable.
Sorry, don't want to seem like I'm picking on you, but I'm also a working professional. I play when my family goes to sleep. I also play more game than once, and am enjoying Mass Effect 2 quite a bit. Could you explain what is a silly, repetitive death penalty? Because all of the other games I've played, barring first person shooters, have something of a death penalty. This game has none. Zip. Zero. If the 15 seconds of downtime is too much of an inconvenience for you, then perhaps you need to reassess your priorities, because damn, that's just ridiculous. A death penalty will either make you more cautious or more skilled. Both of which contribute to the team effort.
Maybe they need to lengthen the respawn timer for PvP, or just declare that once you're dead, you're out of that instance until it resets. But I see no particular advantage to changing the current system for PvE. If someone wants to zerg, let them zerg. It's no skin off my teeth.
Just have the encounter reset, people can't easily zerg and it sort of makes sense, think of it as a do over.
The Derilict system is highly abusive, it is one of the harshest penalties in the serious time wasting, it is immersive to a degree but knocks out casual players who tend to die more often, the idea of drifting helpless in a group if there are still enemies and have ONE system come back and make you attackable again, in solo it is not so bad in that one part. Keep in mind when your talking about these "mini-games" "help from players" "Towing" this is all in the middle of an ongoing mission it clearly stops all flow and action for the damaged player to deal with this incredible penalty. It is one of the most evil systems aside from perma-death.
Comments
Keep it the way it is and have none. I swear a death penalty to entice you from not playing badly is like needing the threat of damnation to keep you from doing bad things. Any form of death penalty is masochistic by design and I'm not into that stuff :P
If there is a death 'penalty' - do it like a first player game and restart from beginning of that section of the mission with all the enemies respawned.
i like your idea. i thought a percentage of your energy credits..like in GTA. needs something.
You lose a small amount of crew upon death, a mild penalty that stacks to reduce your repair rate. This death penalty acts as a money sink, to curb inflation and to encourage players to take part in the economy.
There you go and then no one can play any ship but Cruisers and the boarding party ability is useless. Hang up all escorts in particular, Teir 4 escorts have 50 crew.
Oh and when I take ZERO damage and half my crew is dead or incaped this system blows. I was fighting, used boarding party, took 3% hull damage and was down to ONE, thats right ONE injured crew member, the rest dead, I was 97% intact. Which is why they decided NOT to use this system, it would have been too difficult to fix.
It serves no purpose but to make you run back and forth, it is likely the WORST DP save for perma-death as it will take so log to fly back after each mission rebuy crew and fly back out to where you are, and for what? NOTHING what is that doing other then making me spend upwards of 10 minutes refiling my crew?
Maybe they need to lengthen the respawn timer for PvP, or just declare that once you're dead, you're out of that instance until it resets. But I see no particular advantage to changing the current system for PvE. If someone wants to zerg, let them zerg. It's no skin off my teeth.
Rather than take a penalty for dying, have them game kick you into a short minigame/mission that takes place aboard your own ship. These shouldn't take any more than 1-2 minutes to complete (assuming you rush through as quickly as you can). Additionally, have your derelict ship still floating in space, that allies can "revive" and end your "near death mission" prematurely as they essentially "revive" your ship. Derelicts could not be targeted by enemies (unrealistic but necessary). Regardless of how you come back (ship mission or friendly revive), you return to your ship where it was reduced to 0 hull, possibly at somewhat reduced strength (half or so shields/hull?) but with your officer's powers refreshed to fight off any enemies "camping" your ship.
On top of all that, I would have an option to "abandon ship" available at any time during the "near death mission". This would allow you to respawn immediately, but would carry a small but more permanent penalty, like crew loss, energy creds, or resetting the mission.
death in ground or space restarts the mission completely, with a 45 minute debuff which limits repair/travel speed, reduces weapon effectiveness by 50%.
also remove transwarp ability.
this would be a fair penalty which would separate the hardcore from the scrubs within a week.
In order to use crew loss as a penalty I think they'd have to have all crew "damage" come as a percentage of your maximum crew. Obviously a loss of 100 crew would cripple an escort but a cruiser could shrug it off completely.
This would give a form of economic advantage to escorts. You'd have to pay a lot less to replace your lost crewmen. In fact, it might even make it unfair to cruiser captains (if they have to pay 10x as much to replace the same percentage of their lost crew).
Permanent crew loss could work if it were tweaked properly. If they used the system it has now, though... it would be terrible.
Happened to me several time last night. I was in a region that was highly populated by enemy squadrons, and part of a four-ship team that was engaging a pretty heavily-armed set of opponents. I was one of the weaker vessels, and got creamed early. Respawned next to a DIFFERENT group of enemy, and they engaged me immediately, without giving me the opportunity to rejoin my group. In fact, it happened several times. I just sat back and let the ship get crushed repeatedly until I finally respawned somewhere near enough to enable me to rejoin my team.
If I had to suffer some sort of penalty, it would have been that much harder, and I probably would have bailed on the entire scenario.
OTOH, I do like the concept of a penalty. WoW handles it appropriately, I think - the need to "repair" your stuff occasionally.
Will make Deep Space encounters unplayable in many circumstances. And don't give me the BS retort about "skilled" players. :rolleyes:
I am actually one such person, and this is why I very strongly want a system that keeps you playing when you "die". Make there be no penalty other than 1-2 minutes of playing "off mission". The idea is keep the game fun, but still giving motivation to do your best. You can then present the option of abandoning the "minigame", and take a small penalty, if that is more to someone's liking.
Edit: typo
Please speak for yourself, I'm lucky if I play for 2 hours a day and I would like some sort of mild death penalty.
I have a couple ideas for a death penalty, but the most practical and middle ground one, imo, is simply resetting individual encounters, which I am 100% for.
My DP ideas though...
1) Have a system similar to CO's. It was one of the few things I actually liked about the game. Basically, you get stars that give you stat bonuses and make you stronger, and every time you die you lose a star. You would get these stars back by killing a number of mobs or completing missions.
2) Have some sort of durability system. Exploring new worlds and fighting with the Klingons naturally wears down your ship, and eventually you have to go to an actual station to get fully repaired. -10% for every death, and it wouldn't be too expensive. Simple, and not too much of a time sink.
I have one that's more crew related, but it would require a lot of changes that I know Cryptic won't bother with.
Ships should not explode when the hull reaches 0%. When below 5% hull the ship should be disabled and floating around. The player should have the choice to abandon ship and thus spawn outside the mission or wait for someone else to repair him.
When the whole group is disabled, you would have lost the mission and everything resets. If someone of the group is out of combat he should be able to repair disabled ships. If a group of enemies kills a player and drops out of combat it should reset its health.
Being able to FAIL missions is a definite must have for a meaningful endgame in this game.
A: PVE what would be the point? Having a debuff or a timer associated with respawning seems a little foolish to go fight an npc. The only reason you could conceive of initiating one would be for fleet actions to prevent people from nuking the living daylights out of things and pulling agro to die and come back and do it again (prevents people from padding their dps for rewards)
B: PvP: lets say you have an increased respawn timer when you die x amount of times in a certain time period. In any space pvp battle you have one respawn point, if the timer keeps increasing it would then be possible for the opposing faction to focus on simply killing all their opponents to the point that do to the timer you have them all corralled at their respawn point, and then you just camp them while one guy goes around and caps all the points needed to win the game. Even with klingons and their ability to cloak and battle cloak, any half way intelligent federation group can simply torpedo spread or employ other aoe attacks to keep their opponents in place.
C:Klingons: Klingons at this point get a handful of quests on a daily basis, a lot of their lvling comes from pvping. It would seem counterproductive to say "hey go lvl through pvp, but by the way youre gonna have to sit for a period of time in pvp just waiting to respawn." It's not like they can say TRIBBLE it and go back to pve.
If your captain dies on the ground, then your character is deleted.
If your ship blows up in space, then your character is deleted.
This what you're looking for folks? Because anything less isn't a death penalty.
Seriously, what MMO has this kind of feature?
Or are you simply arguing semantics around the literal definition of the word "death?" (Which would be equally silly, in this context.)
i agree. furthermore, the game should lock and force you to buy a new copy and restart your sub from scratch and reinstall from new discs.
or even better force you to use a new computer or fresh install of windows to continue to play after in game death.
This trolling is why I avoid calling anything a "penalty". Perhaps I should remove the word "death" as well. I will make all future mentions of my ideas the "your ship was reduced to zero hull system". Or not.
Why not take this to its logical extreme and invite the banhammer to hit you. Really, simply posting that you want no penalty for death is sufficient. Trolling threads about this serves no purpose.
You could call it either a setback or an accident.
Sorry, don't want to seem like I'm picking on you, but I'm also a working professional. I play when my family goes to sleep. I also play more game than once, and am enjoying Mass Effect 2 quite a bit. Could you explain what is a silly, repetitive death penalty? Because all of the other games I've played, barring first person shooters, have something of a death penalty. This game has none. Zip. Zero. If the 15 seconds of downtime is too much of an inconvenience for you, then perhaps you need to reassess your priorities, because damn, that's just ridiculous. A death penalty will either make you more cautious or more skilled. Both of which contribute to the team effort.
Just have the encounter reset, people can't easily zerg and it sort of makes sense, think of it as a do over.
The Derilict system is highly abusive, it is one of the harshest penalties in the serious time wasting, it is immersive to a degree but knocks out casual players who tend to die more often, the idea of drifting helpless in a group if there are still enemies and have ONE system come back and make you attackable again, in solo it is not so bad in that one part. Keep in mind when your talking about these "mini-games" "help from players" "Towing" this is all in the middle of an ongoing mission it clearly stops all flow and action for the damaged player to deal with this incredible penalty. It is one of the most evil systems aside from perma-death.
You beat me to it, Slarus... But it needs to be a FULL reset... Any xp and items you gained while in that encounter should be lost.
No debuffs. No item decay. No "punishments"