Feedback talk:User/Kormon Balser/Death Penalty Reduction

From the article A New Way of Looking at Healing and Death on the official GW2 site:

The cherry on top of all of this: Guild Wars 2 will have a much milder death penalty.

Players who have recently been downed several times will take longer to revive each time. If no one revives you, you can spend a small amount of gold to come back at a waypoint. It's as simple as that, and why not? Why should we debuff you, take away experience, or make you run around for five minutes as a ghost instead of letting you actually play the game? We couldn't think of a reason. Well, we did actually think of a reason--it just wasn't a good one. Death penalties make death in-game a more tense experience. It just isn't fun. We want to get you back into the action (fun) as quickly as possible. Defeat is the penalty; we don't have to penalize you a second time.

So my take on this is there is no death penalty like what we saw in GW1 (15% decrease in health and energy with each death). The penalty - if you want to call it that - is that it will take you longer to be revived the more times you have been put into the downed state. That's it. Guild Wars 3 perhaps 20:11, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Well I hope that that is the only penalty. If the time it takes to revive someone gets longer every time they die, then there must be a way to make it shorter (I hope). I have no idea what the mechanic for that will be, but if it is just killing monsters, then I hope that time will be factored in as well. Kormon Balser 20:50, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

I think it is - at the very least - time-dependant; after enough time has elapsed, the time-to-revive will have returned to normal. However, in a previous suggestion, there was a feedback discussionconcerning a player who revives another player will have their own time-to-revive penalty reduced (if they're currently suffering from a penalty). In this way, players are being rewarded for reviving other players which helps foster a greater sense of teamwork and community among the player base versus just running past a defeated player and ignoring them. Guild Wars 3 perhaps 19:21, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Of course, the flaw with it being solely time based is that people might feel the need to wait all of their "dp" off. Players would end up waiting instead of playing, because if they get into an intense battle and somebody dies, they want to be able to revive them as quickly as possible. If too much dp was accrued, players may decide to just go afk for 15 minutes, causing a serious disruption in play. This is where my suggestion comes in with two ways to lose dp. If players get dp, it will be faster to work it off by killing mobs, but if they can't kill mobs, then they could just wait for it to deplete over time.

The purpose of dp is to discourage people like me from running around madly and chopping at things you can't possibly hope to kill, and forcing you to think before you act. It is also a penalty to slow down teams that can't keep themselves alive. Dp causes lots of frustration to people, and so the faster they can work it off the better.

I still think there should be a mechanism that allows people a free teleport, just in case they get stuck (and don't have money). This could either be a teleport to your "home town" that recharges every hour or so, or you get a free waypoint ticket that recharges every 12 hours or something. Kormon Balser 21:47, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

I agree on the whole time-based thing. Waiting off dp is disruptive for the reasons you mentioned and would go counter to the spirit of what the developers seem to be aiming for in GW2; more interaction, not less. Hopefully there will be a mechanic in place for decreasing the time-to-revive penalty beyond just elapsed time. Whether that is killing monsters, reviving other players, and/or some other mechanic, we'll have to wait and see.

I also like your idea of the free teleport. Though it may not happen often, it is certainly within the realm of possibility (based on how the game is currently designed) to have a player enter the defeated state with no gold and no one willing, able, or available to revive them. Then what are they supposed to do? Just lie there for a few hours until some good Samaritan comes along? Log off and come back tomorrow and hope they've been revived?

Just off the top of my head I could see this being abused by someone who's only motivation is to be a pain in the a$$. Scenario: high-level player cons low-level player (totally new to the game) into side-kicking with them. Side-kickee has no gold, by the way. High-level player then lets low-level side-kick get killed down some remote tunnel by enemies that are way over their head in terms of the skill needed to survive (their side-kickee level boost notwithstanding). Then high-level player abandons low-level side-kick to languish in a defeated state in an area that may not have any players pass by for days. Now what are they supposed to do?

I'm sure ArenaNet will address this potential pitfall, because it's too obvious a short-coming of what we know about the defeated state and revival to be missed. We just don't know what their solution will be at present. Guild Wars 3 perhaps 00:47, 20 October 2011 (UTC)

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that reviving other players would be factored in the equation too. But this situation here (which is also in another place on the GW2 suggestions) raises an interesting question. Where will you be when you log back in to the game? Because the game is persistent, the players will be where they were when they logged out. I could see several possibilities.

• Players could be in the exact same state as when they left. This could be a problem if people can just disappear and show up when they want (like if they are about to die, or ditching somebody). Also, because it is persistent, the player would have to disappear as soon as they log off/lose connection.
• Players may appear at the nearest waypoint (for which there should just be an option to warp to the nearest unlocked waypoint for free.)
• A combination of the two: players stay where they are for 5 minutes after losing connection, and then are reset to the nearest waypoint.

Kormon Balser 19:53, 20 October 2011 (UTC)