Game Mechanics If there must be a replacement death punishment,

Yes, yes, remove soul points, that's a given in this suggestion. But a large barrier to the removal of SP is Salted's stated wish that he wants a replacement system in place before that happens, so here's my suggestion to that:

Extend item durability from crafteds to the entire item pool, but make non-crafted durability only decrease upon death, in such a way that you would need to die 10-12 times in a row without repairs to bring durability to zero. As always, items never break.

Pros:
- The scrap + repair system already exists, but right now is siloed to just crafting.
- Emerald sink.
- Gives you something to do with all those uniques and morph-stardusts.
- No more soul points no more soul points no more soul points.
- Most other major MMOs already do this and it works for them.

Cons:
- Death punishment system.
- Something else? (Tell me.)


Remember to vote on the poll! If you pick one of the more narrow options please comment any concerns you have.

 

As an avid hater of durability within games like this, I'm really not a fan. Soul Points aren't ideal, far from it, but I think they could work given significant tweaking. That said, as to what that could look like I'm not smart enough to make any relevant proposals. I think early on since it's much easier to die due to lack of options and for new players not knowing what they're doing scaling back the penalty is fair, as dying repeatedly gets very harsh and forces one to either wait for SP to regenerate or move on to something else; neither of which are great.

 

I think a loss of progress & losing whatever you paid to enter a dungeon/raid/boss altar/whatever other content there is is enough of a punishment. We don't need to rub more salt in the wound.

 

That's even more annoying.

 

If people really want a harsher death penalty for Wynncraft, just have the player lose a percentage of emeralds upon death. It’s that simple. Idk why people try to come with more complicated “solutions.” Unless the game explicitly tells the player otherwise, it would also be very confusing for new players since they would notice their durability on their crafted gear behaves differently from their non-crafted gear and probably think it’s a bug at first. I’m assuming that IDs would also decay as well with durabilty with non-crafted items, which I’m not a fan of at all.

If you don’t think that’s harsh enough, then one can include un-ID’d items, powders, ingredients, and/or consumables. I personally wouldn’t go beyond to include horses or ID’d gear because you practically never get to that point with the current system anyway. You only start to lose ID’d items at 2 sp, and even then it’s only a 10% chance and it just increases to 20% at 1 soul point.

And as others said, Wynncraft doesn’t really need a harsher death penalty. I know Salted said he still wants a death penalty of some sort, but imo I think it’s more to do with figuring out what to do with the extraneous stuff like soul point bombs and the soul point regen ID that’s holding him back from actually removing soul points. And just having better objectives to focus on like Fruma and the skill tree.

 

would this mean soul point regen turns to emerald regeneration?

 

No, I would just remove it from the game entirely and add new ID(s) to the items that focus on soul point regen.

 

So....replace an annoying system with an even more annoying system?

 

I feel like it should have something to do with loss of xp, but it would be odd to loose xp from dying

 

This is like the biggest reason I hate using crafteds. Would it really any different than it is now if there was simply no death penalty?

 

This would be ideal, dying would just be a fail of whatever task you are doing, but then /kill and purposely dying would be a warp tool for the last town you were in.

 

It’s already used that way; you don’t lose much from dying 2 or 3 times in a row, and you won’t need to die more than that to get where you want to go to.

 

Ik, and if they rework soul points then they would probably fix this as it is most likely unintended. (I may be wrong, was this intended?)

 

monumenta has this and it is fucking awful

 

A bit off topic, but why is the first zone of monumenta so… bad? I’ve heard good things about Monumenta, but when I tried it out I had no idea where to go and it felt so clunky.

 

its because its like 6 years old and has barely been updated since it was added. some tweaks were made to it more recently so if you play it again you might notice extra polish but it'll still feel clunky because that's just how the game is for a while

 

I haven't been following the remove soul point talk too much, but... can someone remind me why we even need a physical direct punishment for dying again?

From what little I've seen from other people's suggestions for a replacement, I feel like anything that encourages the player to have to wait a period of time to recover said thing is probably not the best idea to have

 

This kinda feels counterintuitive - if you die to something because you can't defeat it, you shouldn't be punished by making it harder to defeat it.

It's still better than the current system though...

 

"You're having trouble so stop trying to get better" may be the single worst game design choice I've ever seen. All that does is make you not want the content to be challenging, not want to take risks and, if you get stuck, not want to keep playing.

You punish behaviours and actions that aren't intended or that need a downside for balance reasons. If a player uses two pieces of the hive master set, they're given penalties making it basically impossible to function. This is an example of an unintended behaviour being punished; the player is meant to only use one due to their strength. The Eye's laser attack or wretches are punishments for not watching your surroundings and responding to cues in the fight. This is an example of punishing an unwanted behaviour; the player is meant to pay attention and be careful. If you do either of these things, you quickly learn that these are things you aren't meant to do.

If the player encounters difficulties with something -a boss, a quest, a dungeon, whatever- and is punished for attempting to overcome them and failing tells them that trying to overcome challenging content is not an intended behaviour. Getting better at the game to overcome a difficult part is not intended behaviour. Learning how to do a puzzle or memorizing a boss's attacks or getting better at a particularly challenging bit of a dungeon is not intended behaviour.

Telling the player that they need to stop trying to get better at it and to come back only when they are sure they can beat it is the equivalent of saying that if they have trouble, they should outlevel any difficulty. Get carried through a boss. Be escorted through a dungeon. To not play the game at the rate it is designed, but rather to power level and grind to breeze through the quests or to have other people help them through it, because getting good on your own is clearly not intended behaviour.