PC One step forward two steps back

Death penalty inherently sucks. Nobody wants to play the game in weakened form. Any serious penalty leads to death spiral and penalties that are too mild make death into a useful way to fast travel/clear debuffs.

The only solution is DEAD IS DEAD. It's a survival game...if you die, you lose.

 
Death penalty inherently sucks.
Death penalty is sepecially in early game irrelevant. The 10% XP loss is compensated by another killed few Zs.

Nobody wants to play the game in weakened form. Any serious penalty leads to death spiral and penalties that are too mild make death into a useful way to fast travel/clear debuffs.
The XP debuff of death penalty doesn't hinder you on doing anything. You just lost XP. You are not slower, your don't do less damage, your HP is not reduced. It does not cause death loops at all.

The only solution is DEAD IS DEAD. It's a survival game...if you die, you lose.
Yeah of course. Most people want to start from scratch just because they made a little silly mistake. Permadeath ist the EXTREME of that.

You complain about death penalty but vote for death is dead mode? Are you @%$#ed or just stupid?

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Death penalty is sepecially in early game irrelevant. The 10% XP loss is compensated by another killed few Zs.

The XP debuff of death penalty doesn't hinder you on doing anything. You just lost XP. You are not slower, your don't do less damage, your HP is not reduced. It does not cause death loops at all.

Yeah of course. Most people want to start from scratch just because they made a little silly mistake. Permadeath ist the EXTREME of that.

You complain about death penalty but vote for death is dead mode? Are you @%$#ed or just stupid?

First of all, totally inappropriate response. The ad hominem was completely uncalled for. Who @%$# in your cheerios?

Secondly, I never complained about the death penalty. In fact, it is wholly irrelevant to me because I play DEAD IS DEAD.

Finally, I was responding to Roland's post in the academic sense regarding the difficulty in satisfying all the players with any kind of death penalty. If you were paying attention, you'd see that they were discussing the death penalty as a concept, not just as it exists in A19. Roland was talking about combining the A17 debilitation with the A19 XP penalty. I responded regarding that approach's inherent flaw...it's simply impossible to balance.

I'm fully aware that most people would not want to play as I do, regardless of how true it is to the survival genre, therefore my assertion that DEAD IS DEAD is the only solution was quite facetious.

Responding appropriately is much easier when you understand the context of what you're responding to, see?

 
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Death penalty inherently sucks. Nobody wants to play the game in weakened form. Any serious penalty leads to death spiral and penalties that are too mild make death into a useful way to fast travel/clear debuffs.

The only solution is DEAD IS DEAD. It's a survival game...if you die, you lose.
That... makes no sense.  Nobody wants to play in a weakened form and the solution is to start all over as a weak newbie?  /boggle

 
That... makes no sense.  Nobody wants to play in a weakened form and the solution is to start all over as a weak newbie?  /boggle
A new character is unskilled, not weakened. The world around them is built to match that level of skill. The reason why people sat out the A17 death timer was because they didn't want to interact with a world that had scaled to match their skill without having their full strength available.

Those of us who play DEAD IS DEAD don't have that problem and never will. I know it's not the way most people want to play and is fully unsuited for multiplayer, but it does resolve any trouble the devs have in balancing the perfect death penalty.

 
People have been using death as a convenient solution to setbacks for years. When the wellness system was in place it was basically just a new currency for how much it would cost to fast travel or to instantly recover from a broken leg (as that was the only injury at that time). Whenever the devs push a death penalty that is in any way inconvenient, the howling begins.

For me, it is not a problem with temptation. It is a problem with unintentionally dying and having the problems I am trying to legitimately solve getting solved for me. I was at a high percentage of infection and by finding honey I was able to get it down to within 10% of being fully healed. I did a quest hoping to be offered herbal antibiotics as a reward but died during the quest due to poor judgement. Healed. Instantly.

Sucks.  But it does push me to play voluntary dead is dead and just start over. What is interesting is that they have created all of these new injuries and setbacks and yet the death penalty is still so carebear that all they have done is create more reasons for a player who hates the inconvenience of injuries to just suicide. Perhaps when they come out with the vehicle critical malfunctions those can be completely cleared when you die as well...
Yeah, death penalty is still too low. I've been gimped before and unlucky with finding a fix, so when I died it was "yay", no more gimpiness.

It would be interesting to increase the penalty, but have a respawn with no penalty option, but at a distant random location, so you have to run back empty handed through whatever is out there.

 
Yeah, death penalty is still too low. I've been gimped before and unlucky with finding a fix, so when I died it was "yay", no more gimpiness.

It would be interesting to increase the penalty, but have a respawn with no penalty option, but at a distant random location, so you have to run back empty handed through whatever is out there.
I think retaining debuffs on death would help solve the exploit of death being the cure all remedy. I've watched MP lets plays and streams and so many times I hear, "oh I'm starving, I'm just gonna eat glass", "oh crap I have a broken leg, I'll just kill myself".

It makes the entire critical system that you guys have worked on for A19 a complete joke when people can cure themselves through death.

When wellness was a thing, the death penalty was bigger than the current XP debt.

 
Oh look at this! A discussion about the DP! I am almost tearing up here.

I think retaining debuffs on death would help solve the exploit of death being the cure all remedy. I've watched MP lets plays and streams and so many times I hear, "oh I'm starving, I'm just gonna eat glass", "oh crap I have a broken leg, I'll just kill myself".

It makes the entire critical system that you guys have worked on for A19 a complete joke when people can cure themselves through death.

When wellness was a thing, the death penalty was bigger than the current XP debt.
Wellness was a pretty decent concept, but there was no real penalty.

The drawback in having less max life is dying more easily. Death was something borderline positive, so who the heck would worry about dying more easily? It was *way* better having 130 (with perks) minimum life, free teleportation and free debuff curing, than ditching all these and making an effort to raise your max life.

Wellness could have been salvaged though (like LBD)  - like all interesting concepts, it just needed some ironing out.

They tried this in A17 and it was quite unpopular. No need for gamesparks to see that many people just sat around or went AFK until the skill penalty timed out because they refused to play at diminished capacity. The original timer was an hour and then it was reduced to 30 minutes and then it was scrapped for the xp deficit instead.

Perhaps the problem was simply that it was time based. Perhaps if such things were tied to the xp-deficit and went away when that was earned back it would push people to play to remove the curse rather than refuse to play until the curse was gone. I still think quite a few would rage about it though...
Yeah, I think more work needs to be done on the "after near death experience".  Persistent maladies will help, but maybe they should also do some sizeable percentage of damage to your gear so you will likely need to do many repairs.  Or maybe the death experience penalty has debuffs that go with it, such as moving slower or doing less damage, or maybe skill penalties.  All of these should likely go away with the exp penalty, in this scenario.

Near death needs to make you feel like you don't want to go through it again if you can avoid it.  It needs to be worse than what happens to you while you're alive so you have a reason to want to stay alive.  It's a balancing act for sure.


Exactly, death has to *hurt* - that's the whole point and that's how staying alive becomes rewarding. It's human mechanics, no way around them, there is no positive without the negative and all that pizzaz 😛 

People were AFKing, not only because the DP made almost every action "slower", but also because there is not a hint of time-sensitivity in the grand scheme of things. Earning back the deficit sounds good but it might lead people to OC behaviors like our beloved LBD that we eventually had to put down.

I don't like the following solution much, because it is a little prone to OC behaviors as well, but it kind of pampers and punishes players at the same time so:

-Every debuff the player has during the death event, could act as a multiplier (or additions) to the XP penalty's base value. That way players should be very eager to get rid of them, plus not die by/while they are afflicted with them. 

-*But*, and this is an important "but", this is not enough by a longshot, because the XP penalty has a rather low-ish limit - so when that whole bar turns red (which isn't a terrible thing at all, because of the way that disgusting level scaling works), the player could get an actually painful penalty like the death sickness we used to have. The difference with this penalty is that it gives a *lot* of leeway to the player, they can avoid it, work around it and in general, expect it. 

 
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How about this penalty? Whenever you "die" you get "saved" from the nearest Trader. You won't really get saved directly you just need to show it like with a paper being in your inventory which says you're in his dept. So you must pay a price of dukes that depends on your level and gamestage. Something like [Level x Gamestage]. As long as you haven't paid it you can't buy/sell things to him or it's way more expensive and your selling get's like nothing.

And in later Alphas or Beta when the bandits are added you can add something like a period of time (best would be 7 days ;) ) where you need to pay it back or else they will start hunting your Base at daytime. So like a bloodmoon horde just with bandits and at daytime and every day for about 4 hours. This would also fix the problem with having too much dukes.

 
I think DP is extremely flexible now.  Lose stuff or drop bag run retrieve or respawn with stuff.  Buffs.xml can be customized to your liking.  If you are unserious in the game you will take risks, not be prepared for encounters, not have required meds available, lack food, be out of stamina, and die often.  The people who are, "Meh, I'll just eat glass."  aren't playing a survival game.  They want to be playing CS versus bots.  

In my current MP game (Nitro custom 10K with Compopack46 ), at Level 29, GS 38 I have 1 death when I didn't see the land mine.  I have DP set minimal to respawn with my stuff, but I don't like to die.  In fact, I hate it.  I have watched many MP vids of players caught in a death loop because the zombies have over run the spawn, and the player re-awakens defenseless.  No fun.  The XP debuff is bad enough.  But, tolerating deaths in a survival game is just tolerating losing.

My chopper is a mobile EMT...  and I keep a roll of band-aids on the hot bar so I don't bleed out getting to the bike.  My team mates tend to be the bull in the china shop kind, go in pull the whole POI, and light em up.  While I tend to be a sniper with junk turrets (eventually) and find a defensible position and then pick them off from a distance mostly holding a fall back position.  When I'm solo I think the same way, I have a fall back position, then press point stealthily avoiding noise.  My optimal encounter is when I ghost all the zombies without awakening them.  The worst case using my tactic is I wake up too many, fall back and hold.  If I must, I'm not too proud to retreat. 

We had a level 1 buried supplies quest next to...  and ended up running after the 20th zombie climbed out of a hidden well of hell...

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I have DP set minimal to respawn with my stuff, but I don't like to die.  In fact, I hate it.  I have watched many MP vids of players caught in a death loop because the zombies have over run the spawn, and the player re-awakens defenseless.  No fun.  The XP debuff is bad enough.  But, tolerating deaths in a survival game is just tolerating losing.
Yeah, in fact, the XP debuff combined with the loss of pride when losing, are so bad that some people cannot carry all that shame around and get depressed to the point they actually eat glass (since seppuku hasn't been implemented yet)  :(  

 
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If you are unserious in the game you will take risks, not be prepared for encounters, not have required meds available, lack food, be out of stamina, and die often.  The people who are, "Meh, I'll just eat glass."  aren't playing a survival game.  They want to be playing CS versus bots. 
I don't really care about how other people want to play the game. I just care about how unintentional death solves MY problems in an instant when I wanted to solve them through the gameplay designed into the game. There are splints, medkits, sewing kits, vitamins, pain killers, health bars, honey, and antibiotics for a reason and purpose. Death circumvents all of those intentional designs.

When I've got bloodmoon breathing down my neck and then I get sidelined by an infection with not antibiotics it makes the game interesting and urgent because now I have this unintended quest to remedy my infection while also needing to prep for horde night. THAT is fun and so while I'm frantically questing and chopping stumps and make a mistake and die....I don't want all of that instantly solved like it never happened. 

I don't want to get robbed of the victory of handling my immediate injuries and still getting my objectives done. I feel like the devs should protect players like me by putting some more thought into death erasing status effects. I don't want them doing it to stop other players who bought a survival game to play it non-survival.

 
In my current MP game (Nitro custom 10K with Compopack46 ), at Level 29, GS 38 I have 1 death when I didn't see the land mine.  I have DP set minimal to respawn with my stuff, but I don't like to die.  In fact, I hate it.  I have watched many MP vids of players caught in a death loop because the zombies have over run the spawn, and the player re-awakens defenseless.  No fun.  The XP debuff is bad enough.  But, tolerating deaths in a survival game is just tolerating losing.
The  horde night death loop is a solved problem in A19. The horde loses your scent if you die on horde night.

 
The  horde night death loop is a solved problem in A19. The horde loses your scent if you die on horde night.
As of about 3-4 weeks ago, horde night death loop was still a thing on Darkness Falls Mod. Always have to have a retreat plan.  Mine is to have a bridge to a solid building from my hoard base where I can just cheese out the rest of the night being unreachable on the roof.

 
All that it would take is a switch in the settings, that you can flip to "Death erases all abnormal statuses" to "Keep said statuses active after respawning from death". Easy 🤷🏻‍♂️

 
All that it would take is a team of developers to come to consensus that making a switch in the settings to "keep statuses active after respawning from death" is a worthwhile use of time and resources so that they assign the task to someone. Hard🤷🏻‍♂️

 
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Oh, I didn’t think you were criticizing. I agree with you that the coding of an option is the easy solution. 

 
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