Dying in this game is inconsequential. Its meaningless. An instant later you are back in the fight, with no penalty whatsoever.

I realize many here do not want a pervasive death penalty. The HDoL penalty is enough. But without an incentive not to die, death is trivialized.

However, there is an alternative to a death penalty....a survival bonus. This is not really a new idea. A survival bonus was successfully implemented in Sacred Online. Borrowing good ideas from other games is something that DR has done very well. Why not continue this trend?

In essence, a survival bonus gives you a cumulative loot% bonus which increases as a factor of time played in combat without dying. The idea is that the bonus would increase your loot% base (at normal difficulty) and would carry over into the other difficulties.

If you die, the bonus disappears and your loot% gets reset to normal difficulty base. But if you play for a very long time without dying the bonus could increase to some cap, maybe a 500% bonus.

Instead of death penalty, we would then have a survival bonus, which provides a non-punitive incentive not to die. There are two ways to keep a dog at the door, you can chan him there (punitive) or put a bowl of food there (rewarding). The same applies to avoiding death. What do you guys think?

Good idea!

steve

The key would be to make it time played 'in combat' to avoid abuse. Otherwise someone could just log on in town, rack up some hours played without dying and cash in. Dunno how you would code for that, but you guys are smart. Im sure you will figure something out.

This was originally suggested by Pigface in August, 2007 (Survival Bonus) and was commented on by myself and a few others.



Edited by Ripper_McGee (11/24/07 06:52 PM)

I love it, but 500% is way too high!

The bonus cap percentage is of course debatable. Im sure the devs will come up with an appropriate number taking all factors into consideration.

Needless to say, going from level 1 to level 100 without ever dying would be a major accomplishment, which few would ever achieve, and the cap could be set for such an ideal situation--to be rarely if ever realized.