Perma Death

[Hybus]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGlG5bnmLjo


Perma death seems to be a point of discussion lately, particularly what do you do to people who abuse the mechanic. Sure you troll, grief and asshat your way, ruining noobs lives in starting ports and safer areas, but then you eventually die, while you had some negative rep due to association, you aren't guilty of those crimes, so you repeat the process until same thing happens until you get bored of it.

I had the idea of a family exile or travel ban. Your family has proven to be such despicable shit heads, you were exiled and unable to travel freely in UEE space. You could still work on this outside of UEE space to clear it up and demonstrate you are a different cut of cloth, but it takes time and real effort. It also opens up interesting gameplay for smuggling people. You've been exiled, but several ships or items you want are in secured space, you need someone to smuggle you there to pick it up.

 

[Black Sunder]

Even in death I still serve.

 

[Floating Cloud]

I have wondered how they will deal with changing identities. I have to assume that there will be a consistent character identifier (name) that will persist through all deaths. It in some way diminishes the point of character death, but how else will people keep track of friends?

 

[Printimus]

Interesting to see how CIG will implement this mechanic into the game.

 

[Ammorn]

I had the idea of a family exile or travel ban. Your family has proven to be such despicable shit heads, you were exiled and unable to travel freely in UEE space. You could still work on this outside of UEE space to clear it up and demonstrate you are a different cut of cloth, but it takes time and real effort.

IIRC they said the idea was to have your new character inherit some of the standing from your previous character at a reduced amount since they're a relative. I think it would be cool to have prison colony systems where bad criminals not bad enough to warrant a death penalty would be exiled to a prison colony past the edges of UEE patrolled space. The UEE would just have to blockade the jump points on both sides to screen exiled characters from coming though UEE jump points. This would put your new character in a prison colony if your old one died and you'd be exiled from the UEE.

They could offer bounty work or military service in a penile legion that's considered expendable and sent on risky or suicide missions and the survivors are granted UEE citizenship with a clean criminal record if they serve long enough. Bounty hunting would by nature decrease their rep with criminal factions, as would military service if they were policing space and fighting pirate and criminal factions.

It also opens up interesting gameplay for smuggling people. You've been exiled, but several ships or items you want are in secured space, you need someone to smuggle you there to pick it up.

I think it would be easier to smuggle goods to the outlaw than smuggle the outlaw to the goods. Though there would be certain instances you'd want to smuggle the outlaw, like if they're a outlaw bounty hunter or assassin with a target in UEE space.

 

[Ammorn]

I have wondered how they will deal with changing identities. I have to assume that there will be a consistent character identifier (name) that will persist through all deaths. It in some way diminishes the point of character death, but how else will people keep track of friends?

Unique surnames maybe?

 

[Horatus]

I think this could be done well... or terribly.. I find that when you accumulate huge amounts of wealth, resources and power most games tend to stagnate. Civilization for me is a good example of this. I've abandon countless games because there was no challenge left near the end game. I like the way Path of Exile has leagues where characters reset and you can start fresh. While that exact mechanic wont work here it could be a nice refresher to have a new character finding their way in the world again but perhaps with some kind of family legacy or bonus assets. This could also go a long way into player created lore and content. Admiral Horatus of Test led a legendary drunken and ultimately suicidal aurora defense as the system evacuated.

In many games we have all maxed out characters and then abandon them to make new ones. May as well have a lore friendly reason to do that. If not death then perhaps just retirement?

 

[Bruttle]

The video definitely outlines some of my concerns. If there is the slightest possibility of abuse, a percentage of the player base will make it their life's endeavor to use that mechanic to ruin the day of as many people as possible. It happens in every game that doesn't respect this reality. Often, games wait till thousands have left the game as a direct result of this before finally taking action. By then, it's usually too late.

CIG absolutely needs to design the legal system, the death tax, and their gameplay policies with this in mind. Even then, with multiple accounts, I'm not sure it is possible to take sufficient action to deter this toxic behavior. The only thing I know for certain, is that these players exist and will do everything in their power to ruin this game. I hate the fact that they have been empowered to ruin so many games over the years. I dont want to see the same happen to SC.

 

[Bambooza]

The video definitely outlines some of my concerns. If there is the slightest possibility of abuse, a percentage of the player base will make it their life's endeavor to use that mechanic to ruin the day of as many people as possible. It happens in every game that doesn't respect this reality. Often, games wait till thousands have left the game as a direct result of this before finally taking action. By then, it's usually too late.

CIG absolutely needs to design the legal system, the death tax, and their gameplay policies with this in mind. Even then, with multiple accounts, I'm not sure it is possible to take sufficient action to deter this toxic behavior. The only thing I know for certain, is that these players exist and will do everything in their power to ruin this game. I hate the fact that they have been empowered to ruin so many games over the years. I dont want to see the same happen to SC.

This is true of any game mechanic, and why game mods are so important.

 

[Horatus]

We are going to have goon squad so I expect the worst.

 

[Kiladyn]

I think it would be cool to have prison colony systems where bad criminals not bad enough to warrant a death penalty would be exiled to a prison colony

You should read the book Prison Planet by William C. Dietz

 

[Bambooza]

We are going to have goon squad so I expect the worst.

We sort of are like the goon squad.

 

[Ammorn]

We are going to have goon squad so I expect the worst.

Didn't goon squad get BTFO since they had a caustic collective personality? IIRC they were ones talking bad about Star Citizen early on because they couldn't control things like they could in EVE.

 

[Ammorn]

We sort of are like the goon squad.

More like Test I'd say.

 

[Horatus]

We sort of are like the goon squad.

I've had multiple cross game experiences spanning 10 or more years of where they have always been unpleasant griefers who seemed to take personal delight in the grief they caused. I hope we are not like that. It is one thing to be goofy, incompetent and drunk but griefing for the sake of it doesn't appear to be our thing.

 

[Bambooza]

I've had multiple cross game experiences spanning 10 or more years of where they have always been unpleasant griefers who seemed to take personal delight in the grief they caused. I hope we are not like that. It is one thing to be goofy, incompetent and drunk but griefing for the sake of it doesn't appear to be our thing.

It really depends on which side of the engagement you are on as to how your perceive things to have gone. I know i've been accused of being a griefer simply because I was killing players who happened to enter an area we were tasked with protecting while farming for a specific drop. So while we our intent was not to kill for the sake of being dicks we did not give warnings or attempt to allow players to retreat as it was to risky. Even doing some sort of broadcast could have opened up the possibility of an organized counter instead of just a few players who got ganked for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and we hoped to be done before to many people realized what we were doing.

And if you put yourself in the perspective of the killed player it would have very much felt like indiscriminate killing thus being ganked, especially when they came back to the same area and were quickly dispatched with no warning.


So with this in mind I can see us being a very large group engaging in questionable activities having similar experience were we are attempting to accomplish a goal and other players outside of our group just seeing us as being the 1000 pound gorilla throwing our weight around with no reason as to why we targeted them and blew up their ship.

 

[maynard]

CIG could implement some kind of timeout that would increase exponentially for repeated deaths with a negative crime stat, e.g.:

positive status - immediate 'resurrection'

!st death with negative status: 24-hour delay

2nd death - 48-hour delay

3rd death - 96-hour delay

etc

this way a person would need to shell out for new accounts on a regular basis if they want to be serial griefers

add in really substantial payouts to bounty hunters for killing criminals and the griefers would be vastly outnumbered and have bleak prospects of a long lifespan

we will never eliminate griefing completely but there should be mechanics to minimize it

 

[Horatus]

The topic came up at lunch last week at work and I was surprised at how many people had encountered the goons and had similar problems. We are all gamers but we dont play the same games and we come from different age/demographics. When I played City of Heroes and goons moved in there was no zone or resource to guard. It was mostly carebear. They just joined teams to screw up objectives or trigger things to early to cause mission resets or restarts. There was an eventual server wide movement to not team or interact with them. They moved on after things were to boring for them.

 

[Ammorn]

CIG could implement some kind of timeout that would increase exponentially for repeated deaths with a negative crime stat, e.g.:

positive status - immediate 'resurrection'

!st death with negative status: 24-hour delay

2nd death - 48-hour delay

3rd death - 96-hour delay

etc

this way a person would need to shell out for new accounts on a regular basis if they want to be serial griefers

add in really substantial payouts to bounty hunters for killing criminals and the griefers would be vastly outnumbered and have bleak prospects of a long lifespan

we will never eliminate griefing completely but there should be mechanics to minimize it

I think that's a little steep if the times are implemented like that. An alternative to timeouts would be to make the cost of death and other things increase. For instance you'd have to pay more for medical treatment(revives) and more for other services and such as people charge more for aiding a criminal. The worse the criminal the more wanted they are and the higher prices people would charge for the risk and trouble. Criminal faction merchants and such should be cheaper than a non criminal merchant or one that caters to criminals in general. If players are paying more for stuff, then they'll either have to be good criminals or buy more UEC from CIG.

 

[Ammorn]

CIG could implement some kind of timeout that would increase exponentially for repeated deaths with a negative crime stat, e.g.:

positive status - immediate 'resurrection'

!st death with negative status: 24-hour delay

2nd death - 48-hour delay

3rd death - 96-hour delay

etc

this way a person would need to shell out for new accounts on a regular basis if they want to be serial griefers

add in really substantial payouts to bounty hunters for killing criminals and the griefers would be vastly outnumbered and have bleak prospects of a long lifespan

we will never eliminate griefing completely but there should be mechanics to minimize it

Come to think of it, that's where the prison mechanic they've talked about comes in. You'd sink time into escaping or serving your sentence.