Permadeath is the whackamole idea of the MMO industry. It keeps popping up, and the people who argue against it keep knocking it back down. I’ll never fully understand why. Some people I know and respect greatly are huge fans of it. I don’t get it.

The most frequently cited reason against permadeath is, of course, player investment, which put succinctly says, “We never want to give players a reason to stop paying us $10 bucks a month.” Any time a catastrophic occurrance happens in the game, such as you losing your house to a database glitch or the server crashes right after you get the Scepter of Great Bumpfoozlage, there is an opportunity for you to say ‘the hell with this’ and move on. Due to the intricate coding complexities and the… unique nature of sharing a space with other players, it’s hard enough to prevent these catastrophic events from occurring. Why on earth would we want to give you a choice as to whether or not to start a new character, or cancel your account altogether?

The more insidious reason is that your death penalty shapes your grind. The more harsh your death penalties are, the less likely that your player base will take risks and interesting chances. When this happens, players will do the safest, most predictable thing possible, to protect themselves against unexpected happenings like PKers, lag spikes and idiots leading a train of 20 dragons. And just like that, your game is considered grindalicious, as your players bore themselves to death.

Now then, it’s true that some text MUDs and even commercial MMOs have permadeath. One can’t help wonder what the benefit is. One of the supposed advantages is that ‘old characters get recycled eventually’. Why, exactly, is this a benefit? Poppinfresh from the aforementioned Corpnews thread on the subject points out the other results from these MUDs.

It was bad, because people would use it as a means to be drama queens, and for people who got hacked (read: gave their passwords to someone) and then lost their characters.

The Blaze of Glory is a common phenomenon in MUDs with permadeath – it’s the disgruntled player’s way of saying ’screw you guys, I’m going home’. But… what if they changed their mind? I know that I was pretty disgruntled when I quit SWG, and I had no intention of ever coming back when I hit the account cancel button. But lately, I’ve been intrigued with their combat revamp. Still, there’s no way I’d choose to come back if my grandmaster wookie armorsmith wasn’t there.

Will we ever see permadeath in a modern, large-scale MMO. I doubt it. I can’t imagine how hard it would be for a designer to convince the people who count the beans and the people who manage CS that it’s good for the game.

Original comments thread is here.