For a brief moment of clarity, Vanguard proposed to do away with Corpse Runs, which has perversely become the defining feature of their game experience to both fans and critics alike.
– You will no longer leave a corpse when you die; instead you will drop an essence.
– You no longer leave items (Soulbound or not) on your essence.
– Essences will return a large amount of experience upon retrieval.
– Your essence will decay after 70 hours.
– Altars will still allow you to summon corpses from before the patch on 3/30/07 (Build 1799), however, you are unable to summon essences.
– The amount of experience lost when you die has been decreased.
After this was posted last friday, a great hue and cry rose up from the boards. The following comment is pretty indicative.
In my opinion, if you don’t have to go back to the spot of your death for something relatively important, then there’s really not a lot of reason to go back. XP can always be regained, but equipment cannot. Some of the most memorable experiences I have had in MMORPGs (and I’ve been around a while), are things like helping my patron recover his corpse in Asheron’s Call in an incredibly BAD spot out in the wilderness, and EQ when I tried to run through Kithicor Forest at dusk, or my buddy dropping to his death from the trees in the Elf City in EQ, and he had to run all the way from freeport because he forgot to bind…. These are things both me and my (non hard core) friends remember with great fondness. Hell, we talked about them at the water cooler! We are not hard-core, but there needs to be risk, else it’s not that much fun.
I note that almost every one of these posts began with the statement ‘I’m not Hardcore’ as in ‘I’m not hardcore, but I would like the game to repeatedly shock me in the genitals whenever I die.’ Or some close approximation thereof. Vanguard reps tried to defend the system.
We want Vanguard to be more challenging than WoW. I hate the fact that in WoW i don’t really care if I die. I’m one of the few it would seem that actually enjoy a corpse run. I like fearing death. It makes the game much more exciting for me. And that’s the key, we need to fear death in Vanguard without frustrating the player to the point of giving up. We have put in several mechanics to work around those various issues. But at some some point it just gets too cluttered and confusing for the player.
TwilightSea asked the question “Why do you feel a change is needed?” What are the likely suspects?
While leaving items on the corpse in one way to make death mean something, it’s also a customer service nightmare.
– Items get lost.
– Players think items got lost.
– Players cant get their corpse / items back and they don’t want to summon their corpse because they will lose exp.
– the corpse / items are just plain lost due to a unforeseen bug.
– the player accidentally lost some items while looting.
– the player thinks is crazy that they can get their first set of gear back while wearing their second set of gear when clearly the first set wasn’t good enough.All that equates to CS getting clogged with petitions therefore making legitimate petitions take much longer.
This was followed by much crying by the players that irate CS personnel was not a good enough reason to make a game design. Clearly, these players have never had to have a conversation with a CS lead who was thoughtfully holding a cricket bat while gazing into your eyes with white hot fury. Still, eventually Sigil folded… at least for now.
In fact in a few hours we’ll be removing the new mechanics after getting some great feedback and bug reports. Does this mean that the death mechanics will never change? No, but we are serious when we say that the test environment is exactly that.
One of the most annoying things about the hardcore vs. casual debate is that, as a general rule, only the hardcore are emotionally invested enough in the game to post on message boards about it. There are very few reliable tools for discovering how the casual player feels. Unfortunately, the best one is the exit polls.
So what should Vanguard do here? It’s a catch-22. On one hand, death penalties is a ridiculously easy thing to screw up (see seperate post), and it sounds like Sigil realizes that they need to soften the blow somewhat. On the other hand, the Vanguard community, as a whole, is hostile not only to anything that would be considered the ‘WoWification’ of their game, but also to casual gamers in general. In building the community around their vision, Sigil ended up building one that literally tells weekenders and soloers to ‘learn to play!’ This is a surprisingly common problem – we did it on Shadowbane. SWG did it as well, albeit with a different kind of hardcore.
My own two cents: you can’t change who the game is targetted for (a lesson from SWG). You can’t change your hardcore audience mainstream – all you will do is alienate the hardcore that is already there. But being hardcore-only is going to limit Vanguard, as they put up with the new entries coming onto the market, including LotRO, Warhammer, and Conan. Vanguard needs to find solutions that not only please both hardcore and casual players, but can actually turn their very hardcore and dedicated base into evangelists for their product.
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