Altearia's page

While in general I like GW's approach to death--a penalty that is meaningful but not crippling, and most importantly, a penalty that doesn't take you "out of the fight" and waste play time--I am not so sure about one aspect.

I don't understand the rationale behind the husk-looting mechanic. Someone corpse loots you, and they get a single item while you lose everything, poof, instantly. What does that do for behavior?

Let's compare two proposed mechanisms:

A) 1 Touch Poof! (current)
B) Persistent Lootable Husk (variant: looter can take one random item only, while husk with remaining items persists)

Looter behavior: I think my behavior as the looter is the same either way. Under both systems, if I come across a dead corpse, my direct economic incentive is unchanged: me gets one item.

Dead Guy behavior: I have an increased incentive to get back to my corpse most ricky-tick--the marginal utility of a corpse run is now more likely to result in return >0.

To the best of my understanding, the current 1 Touch Poof system is fairly harsh, and may under-incentive getting back to your bod, because there's a relatively higher chance it's gone poof. The Persistent Lootable Corpse is less punitive--relatively higher chance of getting some of my stuff back, but also a corresponding incentive to get back to your bod.

So the question is which behaviors are more desirable to incentivize: risk-minimization to avoid the steeper penalty of A, or fighting back to your bod, as in B. Anyways, I'd be interested to hear what GW's rationale for the A system is.

Like you I was nodding my head to GW's ideas for death, till I read the part about the rest of your inventory is deleted after a single looting. I'd much prefer your Persistent body system.

I agree with him too. Andius I am confused how I gave the impression that I wanted anything different?

My point that I'd accept any form of combat was an over exaggeration to stress the point that combat doesn't make or break sandbox games, it's just an element to them as you said. Almost every sandbox release I've played to date has utterly failed with combat centric gameplay, falling short in almost every other area. You raise the point about Wurm and Runescape, they are sandbox games which totally lack any form of enjoyable combat, yet funnily enough I'd be more inclined to play them than a themepark/poor sandbox.

I feel much older a gamer than my years would suggest. I can't pick up a conventional single player action game and stomach it for more than a few hours at best. I guess my initial point was just stressing the fact that in a sandbox MMORPG, in tune with my own preferences, combat is not the predominant factor and the development process would benefit as a whole if it avoided development time and money on risky innovative combat mechanics. Why do I think this? Sandbox games still thrive in cases in which combat is well below par; in contrast, sandboxes die if anyone one of the crafting system, economy, community or world design is well below par. I understand the general consensus for combat to be 'good', I just sincerely hope that the game is designed with a priority to establish functional, simple and quality features than trying to build an innovative combat system. Were in an age where MMORPGs are realizing the technology to start implementing action rich combat mechanics into our MMO games; they're also completely omitting the breadth and depth of rich sandbox content which I personally miss, a lot. I'd take fisty cuffs for a well rounded game.

I use my experience beta testing Dawntide in validifying this argument in my head. Dawntide, may it rest in peace, had combat on par with runescape, yet I could have played that game for ever.

It doesn't need to be innovative, it just needs to be good, and both WoW and SWToR both have less than desirable combat systems, so if that is what is planned Goblinworks better think again. I personally will find it very hard to go back to tab targeting after all the time I have spent in TERA, where my skills actually have a large impact on the outcome of combat, rather than it being purely about numbers.

As has already been said, you can fix and add sandbox elements post launch, but you cannot fix the combat, what you launch with is what you get for the rest of the game's life-time, and assuming this game lives for the next 10 years I would really like to have something more alined with TERA, than with WoW, it is just more fun. If you omit making the combat both good and fun then you risk a wide range of negatives, from being labeled 'yet another tab target WoW-clone' in an era that is shifting to systems with more user input, to outright killing the game through lack of fresh blood to the game. The new players will only experience combat for their first weeks of the game, they won't be building a town, they won't see many of the positive elements of a sandbox till they have progressed more into it, so if the first thing they think based on the combat is 'man, this game plays just like SWToR, and I don't want to play that again' they will just quit, and without enough new people to replace the old people, who move on to other things, your game just dies.

But all that said I don't want another themepark, I want something more to my game, I want to build a town and burn my enemies to the ground, I'm tired of being just another [insert class here] in [insert game here]. I will just be extremely put out if they just give me a Sandbox WoW.