Game Design The Point Of Soul Points?

The main thing I don't understand about Soul Points is the fact that if your points are low enough, you will begin to drop items, and how that progressively gets more punishing. I don't see how that in any way is enjoyable for a player. ESPECIALLY since you can only acquire Soul Points every sunrise, meaning a player may be forced to wait up to 20 minutes or MORE just to go back to questing. I understand that a penalty is necessary but there are very few MMO-type games that take away a player's hard-earned items(the very thing they play for). This is made even worse by the fact that most of the time, the chunk will be unloaded and the items will despawn immediately. At the very least, that's what happens to me.

If any of the devs could shed some light as to what sort of thought went behind this feature, that'd be great. Thanks!

 

I think it's simply there to make them game harder and make it so people don't run aimlessly into their deaths over and over again without regards for a punishment.

 

without soul points, dying would never matter. If you never lost any items and had "infinite lives" you could run around carefree, go into places above your level without risk, things like that. Soul points are needed to balance the game

 

just git gud and don't die :^)

 

Well, skill points make you try avoid dying as much as possible. Also, the loss of items as your skill points decrease is essentially a warning telling you that if you keep dying, ALL of your items will be dropped instead of just a few. (along with an actual warning in chat lol)

 

Almost every MMO out there has some sort of penalty for dying. You lose your health/mana and are forced to regen it, you lose your money, or you have something taken away from you as punishment for death. Wynncraft's method of this aspect is the soul point system, where multiple deaths lead to the player losing their items.

As mentioned above, the soul point system is crucial for controlling death in the game, and without it death is okay and no "fear aspect" is enforced upon dying. The soul point system is there to make sure players are aware of their death count, and if a player disregards it they will end up losing their items.

Just try not to die much, and if you get to 7 or lower soul points, maybe quit for a few hours or go afk in a safe spot to regain them. It's not that bad of a system, and if you stay aware you won't have a problem with it.

 

Just like everyone else has said, it's a penalty for dying or else people would go around carelessly dying without thinking. Also, if you run out of soul points just call it a night or take a break to regen them.

 

Hoping that you don't drop below 5 soul points, you can still play the game. Having up to like >7 soul points is good enough and you wouldn't drop any of your precious items, aside form the random emeralds you have. Just don't bring your full emerald storage with you.

 

In most games though, the punishment doesn't get progressively more severe the more you die. That's the main thing that I really just don't understand. I think losing accumulated XP or emeralds when dying isn't bad, but the game basically punishes you for playing the game by taking away your items. Of course, that's only if you get low Soul Points but like I mentioned, accumulating them is tedious. If by chance you ever do get below 5 points you basically are forced to STOP playing the game, in fear of losing precious items, which is counter-intuitive to the MMO formula. It's especially bad for newer players who don't have items that increase the total Soul Points you can accumulate or increase the amount you generate per sunrise, and also lack the skill to NOT DIE. I also just want to mention that so far this has really only been a problem for me a few times. I'm not particularly mad, I just found it to be a poorly-designed system, especially since you can potentially lose EVERYTHING if you get caught in a vicious cycle of losing items.

 

This is why we have soul point gear along with the ability to swap servers to get soul points, there are also soul bombs in the shop that you can buy for soul points and you get soul points even when you are logged off.
While it is somewhat slow because of a Minecraft day there are ways to speed up the process and we feel like these ways are good enough to counter it.

 

Fair enough, I suppose. Thank you.

 

Lock thread plz before this burns