MMO Gamers

As you probably know I’ve been playing Age of Conan since it released.  I’ve had plenty of deaths in that time and as far as I can tell there’s no death penalty.  You do lose a couple of points from your skills like magic ability, but this is only temporary and on a 30 minute timer.  A tombstone is left at the scene of your demise which you can retrieve, restoring your skills instantly.  But that’s it.  There’s no loss of XP or XP debt such as those found in Vanguard for instance, nor is there a monetary penalty of any sort.

So are death penalties a good thing or should developers get rid of them altogether?  The pro death penalty side would argue that it adds tension to the game and encourages the player to put more thought into their decisions.  Risk versus reward.  The side against death penalties just hate it.  Why should you go down in experience?  Surely you’ve learnt something from your death?

Sure, it probably forces you to put a bit more thought into the mobs you’re attacking or the situation you put yourself in.  But what’s more enjoyable?  Cautiously taking down mobs one at a time from a safe vantage point?  Or tearing into a group of mobs with everything you’ve got and seeing who the victor is?  Let the cards fall as they may.

Vanguard had a very heavy death penalty.  At my level I was losing around 200K worth of XP on death.  Mobs were worth about 5-8k a kill.  That’s a lot of grinding to make it up.  Much like Age of Conan you could retrieve your tombstone, restoring a large amount of XP, somewhere around 150k.  But if you died again while trying to retrieve your tombstone then that was an additional 200k XP loss.  The problem with death penalties is that it isn’t always your fault, nor can you avoid dying sometimes.  If, for instance, your group wipes because the tank did a bad pull or mobs re-spawned on your location.  Just yesterday I was pulling un-dead near the mausoleum in the Noble District of Tarantia when the game crashed.  I immediately logged back in to find myself swarmed by un-dead and my health nearly gone.

I used to be a fan of the death penalty because I believed it added tension to the game, but Vanguard’s injurious penalties just left me angry and frustrated; it took the fun out of the game.  Games shouldn’t make you feel like smashing the screen.