Patch got you fuming? This makes interesting reading

[keriann]

the article was good but takes count only of newbies and veteran assidual players.. doens't take count of CASUAL players which costituites over 70% of the players of a game. which usually takes very badly big changes.

why it didn't took in consideration those? easy. causal players usually do not bother with forums. plays with friends once or twice per week and leaves if are unable to play along friends like that neither are interested in roleplaying or meet new people sometimes even.

it's a matter of common sense... you must ensure everyone to be able to play the way they like... add variety instead of make drastic changes. easy is good for some areas, and other areas can be alot harder, giving sizeable rewards to players who likes challenges.

[shenan]

In the long term we're all dead

[helbreat]

in the early days of swg it was alot harder on the jedi heh if you died more than a certain amount of times in a given time all stats would be reset to padawan and you couldnt log on for a week but people made it hard for the dev team to keep that as thats not what you pay an online subscription for is to not be able to play so i think that kind of game would only work if it was free ;P

[amitst]

In pre patch 1 conditions I could easily play this game for two years, I like the idea of getting all my stats to at least 200, which really would take me 2 years. But now we realize that even at high levels it will be impossible to explore by yourself still. There is no fun if you realize you can't get anywhere. Therefore ryzom = ridiculous, there is nothing to aspire to

[maggers]

Very good Artical, very acurate.

I would see myself as a Oldie and I can see what they are trying to do with Ryzom.

I just hope Point #2: Newbies won't play a virtual world that has a major feature they don't like, doesnt come true.

Casual Gamers like to be able to solo. They just took that feature away, pity.

How easy would it have been to leave everything as it was and change the exp from each kill ?

All that would have happened after the initial moans and groans would have been 6 months down the road people would have said "Hey remeber in the good old days, we used to get 3k exp from these. Those where the days!"

Oh and thanx to davewil for posting it. /good job

[jokque]

He has some very good views on virtual worlds, and I think he is right on most accounts. I would really love to try a game with Permanent Death, it will certainly make things more interesting.

Did they add PD for jedi's in SWG or was it cancelled?

they had this in diablo2, "hardcore mode", (which meant that the normal game mode quickly was called softcore, hehe)
In diablo2 it worked well (in 1.09 and below) because you could level fast, there wasnt your standard mmorpg timesinks (as it wasnt a mmorpg where they needed you to stay around to make more money) so if you died it wasnt really that big a deal, and the magic gear you used could be "farmed" by doing "magic find" runs
In diablo2, hardcore was fun. I think my record to lvl 90 was about 10 hours, thats from starting at lvl 1, not from scratch items-wise of cource. In a mmorpg its not going to work. the reason it worked in diablo2 was because team play wasnt needed, every class in the game could easily solo hordes of mobs. The mmorpg standard is that a full team tackle 1 hard mob at a time, with fights lasting as long as 30 minutes. ONE tiny mistake here and it would mean that you and possibly your entire team got killed, would you like to have your previous 6 months of gameplay go down the drain like that ?

[krone9]

permanent death isn't appropriate in these sorts of games - combat is unrealistic in that death is the only outcome for one party so until that is addressed I can't see PD being viable.

[deitrich]

There are many problems with absolute perma-character death.

Lag Death.
Boredom (Oh look I have to do exactly the same thing again with a new character...zzzzzz).
Lag Death.
Time. (Well that's 6 months wasted).
Lag Death.
Fear. (I spend the last year leveling this character, there is no way I'm going to do that!!!)

Oh, did I mention Lag Death.

Perma character death can only work if its as much fun to repeatedly start an alt and play again from level 1 as it is to play at the higher levels. I can't see any Dev team ever being able to add this much content into a game.

[hivewasp]

Dunno for death... but I heard in the interview on french tv that natural aging and dynasties were to be implemented in Ryzom. Perma death might be the solution against full 250 skill trees

[jenuviel]

Dunno for death... but I heard in the interview on french tv that natural aging and dynasties were to be implemented in Ryzom. Perma death might be the solution against full 250 skill trees

I'm fairly certain that the aging is an optional factor that's tied to having children in-game (which you can then play yourself). There hasn't been much detail released about it yet, though, and what little I've seen on it was from pre-reviews made around a year ago. Either way, the generational system of aging, birth, and renewal all sounds like fun to me.