Last month, I posted a bit about the concept of risk in MMOs and the conclusion I came up with is that most modern themepark MMOs have sanitized their gameplay such that risk is no longer a factor. I feel that risk is an intriguing design element and that without it, our MMOs are less than they could be. In this article, I am going to talk about a traditional MMO death penalty that has been abandoned in most modern games, Losing Your Cool Stuff.
Of course, the most extreme example of this penalty is the Full Loot/Corpse Run — you die and everything you own is left on your corpse. You might have a window where only you can loot your corpse, or if the game is “full loot”, then your corpse is fair game. This is the death penalty of old-school, “hardcore” games like Ultima Online, Everquest and more recently, Vanguard and Darkfall. I understand why people don’t like corpse runs. You play through dozens of quests and instances to get great gear, only to die in the middle of a lava pit and have to sit naked and forlorn, staring at your unreachable corpse as the timer runs down and your precious items vanish. Full loot is even worse because almost every death brings with it the loss of your good stuff — and most players hate losing their stuff.
The Drop Chance System
This is a simple tweak to the full loot idea. When you die, instead of dropping all of your items on your corpse, each item has a small percentage chance that it drops — say between 2 and 5 percent. When an item drops, it will either stay on your corpse, to be possibly looted by players, or it will appear in the inventory of the monster that killed you. Most of the time, players will be able to shrug off death, having lost nothing, or only trivial items. However, every so often, death will mean the loss of a powerful weapon or armor and the player will have to decide whether it is worth the effort to get it back.
One of the problems you see in full-loot games is that items lose a lot of their value. You might own a powerful sword, but because the chance of losing it is so high, you never take it out of the bank. At this point, though the sword might be worth quite a bit of in-game currency, it isn’t in play and thus becomes pointless. If you want a game with lots of important, powerful gear, full-loot probably isn’t the way to go. Darkfall is a good example of this. Gear is important in the sense that it makes a difference in combat, but it is all expendable (and consumable) and so no specific piece of gear is interesting.
By making item loss possible, we add an element of risk. By making item loss rare, we increase the expected return of a player equipping his best gear. If there is only a 2% chance of losing the Greatsword of Doom and it increases your combat abilities by 20%, that is a pretty good bet that most players will be willing to make. We get our element of risk, but still get more gear, and more interesting gear, into the game.
Let’s take a look at some other ramifications and possibilities of this system.
Spicing Up Loot Tables: If you die to a mob, any items lost will be found on the inventory of that creature when you kill it. This gives players a chance to get their gear back, if they are so inclined, but also means that any mob kill has a chance to turn up some unexpected gear dropped by another hapless player. I like the idea of killing a wandering goblin and finding he just killed an unfortunate adventurer to the tune of a couple hundred gold and a nice sword.
Spicing Up the Monsters: Take that one step further and actually give the creature the benefits of any items he takes from players. I would mark these creatures in some way (ideally by putting the armor/weapon model on them) to show players these creatures are enhanced, but carry more loot than usual. You would have to limit this to humanoids, or just accept that this is a little goofy — how would a raging boar wield a sword? Still, imagine coming across a goblin in the wilderness and jumping him, only to find that he is wielding a wand of fire, or going up against a giant ogre boss when you know he just wiped the previous group and snatched a particularly powerful mace… but man do you want that mace!
Unique Items: One possibility I find very intriguing is that this system would allow the inclusion of powerful unique items in the game. These artifacts would be more powerful than similar items of their level, or have unique effects, but would have much larger drop chances. They are worth seeking out and owning, but you know that you won’t keep them for very long. Sooner or later, you will die and the item will pass on to the next owner.
Spicing Up the Economy: Part of the game’s economy could be focused around drop chance. Because the drop chance is low, I think people will be more willing to use (and lose) cooler stuff. However, because the chance to lose your good gear is there, most people will have backup sets. These sets will have to be looted, bought or crafted and I think a viable economy would exist for “second-tier” items. Crafted “second-tier” items would be even more in demand if you made the drop chance for crafted gear lower than that of looted gear.
A possible variation of this system is that drop chances could start low, but then increase as the player died. Certain classes or crafters could have access to enchants or buffs that lowered the drop chance. An economy would certainly spring up around these enchants as people tried to protect their best pieces of equipment.
Tying Risk to Reward: You could make certain areas of the game increase the base drop chance of the items of anyone who dies there. Increasing the drop chance increases the risk, because players who die have a higher chance of losing items. However, the rewards in that reason would be increased, either because the designers put the best stuff there, or just because all the monsters you are facing are likely to be carrying player gear. Dungeons could have the absolute best rewards, but only if you were willing to brave a greatly increased chance of dropping your best items.
So that’s the idea… If I were to be creating an MMO, I would consider a drop chance system as a compromise between a hardcore risk system like full loot and a no risk system like durability loss. Still, there are other ways to inject risk into a traditional themepark game and we will explore another one of those next post. Until then, I hope you have some questions, comments or ideas of your own. I would love to hear them.
I know that the Drop Chance System actually exist already in a few MMOs such as Mabinogi.
Your items have a set % chance of dropping when you die. You can “Bless” those items so that if you die, they will not drop but they may lose their blessing. When an item is lost in a dungeon, you can get it back for a rather large price at an NPC. (Mabinogi’s system)
I like this system. Players will still use all of their strongest items even though there’s a chance of dropping them upon death. Only difference is that there are various ways to be revived and grab those items back fairly quickly (Phoenix Feathers, Nao Soul Stone, Dungeon Revive) even though these solutions will penalize you for reviving (EXP loss and Gold loss based on the choice you picked)
Love your idea! Losing exp in death has always been annoying. It can’t be applied to PvP properly, etc. Chance of item loss, and having a mob use it against you when you try to get it back, that’s slick.
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You could tie in the loss of the item to something being soulbound as well. Your death actually causes the item to not become bound, and therefore, lootable. Although that might lead to anything not soulbound is always lootable, that hurts lower levels a lot more, which is not good.
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Thinking about WoW, this would be great in world PvP, something that battlegrounds destroyed and Blizzard has not figured out how to get back. Although structured PvP should be not have this loss. As soon as it feels like your going to lose, people will /afk out of the BG/Arena to save their stuff. Only happen on Honorable Kills off course. Or maybe only on even levels and kills of higher level to prevent gank-stealing.
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As far as humanoids actually using the items, you could restrict creature types, like your aforementioned bears to highly prefer rings/amulet/trinkets. These items would not need to be worn (lets say they got eaten) to have an effect and therefore buff the bear. Even if this would be hard to do, you could easily use something similar to the WoW’s silver dragon to indicate that something feels different about that mob.
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I think your 2-5% on each item is a little high though. With all the stuff you are wearing that would mean almost an item every other death. At least in WoW, items literally ARE your character after max level, so that’s a bit rough) Maybe a 10% chance of losing an item, if it occurs, it then randomly decides which item. I remember in one game (EQ?) everyone would start to run and stuff their best items in their bags (only equipped was lootable) before they died. Maybe randomize your bags as well to keep Paladins from using bubble then bagging everything?
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I can see a lot of other little issues with this that would need to be addressed (people will deliberately die to Hogger over and over again to make him stronger). But tweaking these little things would be worth the effort to make this work.
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I would start WoW back up again if they made a new server with these rules (even if it was only PvE item loss). I also guarantee that is will be swamped with players, so much so that more than a couple will be needed. Again, I absolutely love this idea of yours.
” If you die to a mob, any items lost will be found on the inventory of that creature when you kill it….give the creature the benefits of any items he takes from players”
I liked this idea so much, I’m implementing it right now in my own MMORPG (see my website link). Hopefully it should be implemented in a day or so.
This is a really fun concept and I think would give incentive for players to go out of their way to hunt down legendary monsters that have been a nuisance for a long time.
I think darkfall is evolving toward a play to win mmorpg, but it’s still in an amphibian state – it’s moved on from being a fish, but it’s not a mamal yet, either.
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The risk system, which perhaps seems shocking and exciting at first, isn’t fun from moment to moment once you start seeing the overlaying structure.
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Take this example: If you went out with 200 gold on you, your risking 200 gold. Now say you come back to base with 200 gold…does that sound exciting? No, it sounds like risk for absolutely no benefit at all. Now with darkfall, imagine leaving home base with 150 gold, then finding 50 gold? Great? No. Because you don’t have that gold yet – you could lose it all on the way home. It’s actually the same as the 200 gold example – you haven’t won anything, your just risking more and more and more stuff for no benefit at all.
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Now granted if you get back to base and bank it all, then you’ve won that money. But it’s going to be half an hour to an hour before that happens. That is not moment to moment fun. It might feel like it when you find a chest full of gold, but once you see the bigger structure, you see that chest isn’t any fun at all. Only getting back to the bank with it all is, and that’s not happening any time soon.
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Sure if you like delayed fun, it’s okay. But that’s why I call it an amphibian or reptile – it’s not warmblooded yet. It has to laze around in the son for ages before it really gets going.
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I’d suggest just having an ante – an amount a player has to fill with a certain amount of gold, or equipment equivalent to a certain amount of gold. This ante and only this ante is lost upon being killed. So if you do find 100 more gold, it really is a win right here, right now, because you can’t lose any more than the fixed ante from before.
Chances of any of this happening are slim. There is a reason they’re called themepark, you know.
This idea sounds fun, I especially like the idea of epic high loss percentage gear. You get some fun bow that procs explosive toads and you get to run with it for a few weeks, knowing that sooner rather than later you will loose it. They should probably have some sort of bank evaporation timer too. so that you can’t just sit on them without taking them out into the world.
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Also this could be used as a system to encourage finding new gear, as you out level something its loss percentage would go up. and if you did loose it you wouldn’t care as much as the item was dwindling in effectiveness anyway.
oh and the teddy bear with the sword, awesome!
I SO need a bow that procs explosive toads!
Oh, another idea would be to have non permanent loss – you lose the epic item for a certain RL period of time, then it returns to you. So during that time you have to find a substitute.
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This way your scared of losing items, but in the long run you still enjoy them like unlootable stuff from wow.
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Of course it doesn’t quite gel in simulationist terms…ie, why does the item return to it’s owner eventually? Eh, just say a wizard did it…
You might have already seen it, but Kotaku just put a snippet up about Cryptic (Star Trek) looking at making death more meaningful
Pretty good timing I’d say.
http://tinyurl.com/ygxj8m3
I’d love to see something implemented into many of the games I play to add the old-school flavor of death penalties. I couldn’t care less about dieing in most of the games I play nowadays. I’ll assault people – especially NPCs – with far better gear, more health, or higher level than my toon because it just doesn’t matter if I die. I’ll be back up and at my previous location in less than 3mins.