Death - A discussion

[Chewett]

Purely from a technical point of view, the death system is actually stolen from the Torch Contest system. When dead you are put into a state of being in the torch contest and this has some unfortunate consequences. Once we rework the death system and work out what we want it to mean by being "dead" we will certainly change this.

However some of the big questions are death presents are:

How limiting do we think death should be? Currently its actually quite a nice system in terms of allowing you to do some things, but not all. However this does need a bit of effort. I would be interested to hear opinions from others about how "far" the death system should go. Is it currently working well for those who died?

I know in the past people have left from being killed, which is a great shame. By limiting the players freedom it can seem as if they are stuck. We need to ensure that this sytem cannot be abused to permanently keep someone out of MD. While this may seem as a good RP situation for some, for others it will involve them just not being in MD at all. Which is something we will want to avoid.

Does this mean that killing someone is too hard, or maybe too easy? Opinions here are welcome. I know a number of you raised concern that death is only available to the elite, with a large amount of coin in purse to purchase a use of a tool, or the tool itself. Maybe a certain about of losses in a period of time would "Kill" a character temporarily?

One such discussion point raised was that some people felt that potentially you should be left in your alliance when dead. The reasoning was that this would then allow people something to do during their death. This has some technical questions as while you can be a member of a land different from your alliance, I would need to check how well this works.

Revival is always an interesting point of view, Either you require a friend or tool yourself, or currently I believe there is the grave wreath. There was some concern in discord that 1000 flowers is a large number to require, and certainly wouldnt be sustainable over a number of deaths. Potentially we need easier ways to revive for the loner type characters. Say after 2 months they are back? But even two months is a long period...

Opinions here are welcome, this is a post discussing my and others viewpoints, I wont necessarily be solving these problems immediately.

[Ledah]

More death anchors or ways to get AP while dead would be nice.

As for helping people revive on their own, maybe give a certain amount of Reality Shards per day, so many that it takes a couple months of just sitting in the graveyard to revive for 'free' using a clickie ala the wreath binder. IIRC the cooldown on killing tools is a month or so and 2 months is a long time to live with the restrictions of being dead.

OR make it way harder to kill people/get away with it, but I don't like this option.

[Aia del Mana]

I believe this had arisen in discussion with others, but one quite prominent, and polarising, suggestion, had been that the cost of revival should be commensurate with the cost of murder. Presently, the only methods of revival within the realm were the use of some rare items (similarly rare to those that may murder), single-use elixirs, and the Grave Wreath, which were prohibitively expensive in terms of the time required to create it.

If one were to make the murder-weapons also cost commensurate to that of revival, then one should, in example, require of one thousand units of Pure Gold to activate of a murder weapon, rather than merely a single unit, or gold coin. If it did require even half of the effort required to create of a Grave Wreath, even this should be prohibitive enough to prevent of murder without significant cause.

Alternately, if one doth make the revival-items also cost commensurate to that of murder, then one should merely pay the reaper a single gold coin to be returned to life. This in essence would defeat of the purpose of such weapons, but it illustrates of the severity of the imbalance.

If death were a state that were permissible, then it should also be a state where it may be desirable for some; this were presently sorely lacking, as interaction, and movement, were limited, and little were gained. I would imagine one who were dead, in example, to be able to roam freely within the realm without respect to Action Points, but be unable to engage in combat, or gathering of resources, or recruitment of creatures; such that the advantages gained may balance of that lost.'

Of Alliances and Death - I believe these should both exist, and in isolation of each other; one doth not change of her allegiance upon death; her role, values, and beliefs remain unchanged; thus should her presence within the Alliance.

Edited March 24, 2019 by Aia del Mana

[Kaya]

The main problems with death seems to be the feeling of helplessness that comes along with it. While there are multiple ways to be resurrected, unless you own your own revive item you will be dependent on others to bring you back to life. Meanwhile there is nothing much one can do while dead. I know Azull is working on some things to make death more interesting/allow people to revive on their own, but from what I understood Gateway has priority.

This problem is only aggravated by the way death works. You are bound to a remote corner on the map, so it is unlikely you will run into many random passer by's, people can't PM you unless they have you on your friends list or you send them a PM first, the mood panel is prohibitively expensive as you gain only one AP per day, your movement is extremely limited and even if you move you'll probably be send back within half an hour. Most of them minor nuisance on their own, but they add up to an almost complete isolation within the game, forcing the player to take things almost completely to the forums.

For example a Death anchor at the GoE would already make it a lot easier for the dead to make contact with the living (and it makes sense, as the dead have been brought there to plea for their case since times immemorial). Furthermore I'd love to see the AP cost for the mood panel removed as  too often something happens I'd love to comment on, but which doesn't really warrant a forum post, yet am unable to because of AP.

As for killing, there should always be a way to prevent being killed. Sanctuaries should be absolutely safe, and even outside those there should be some way to stop the killer, even if it takes some effort. More than once I've heard the dead say something along the lines of "it doesn't atter, because I'll be killed again anyway."

[Mallos]

More death anchors and ability to get between them on occasion while dead. That way players aren't shut out from playing MagicDuel, considering that interaction with other players is a key part of the gameplay, rather they have various limitations on doing so. I'd argue that alone would fix about half of the issue of being dead which is being stuck in the graveyard the whole time.

Currently very few players are able to kill other players so retaliation is almost a moot point. Revival items are also very rare and in some senses more costly than the kill items. If you revive a player you risk someone killing you and having no protection for yourself. If you are killed you may have to pay for a revival, just to be killed again. The killer is gaining in whatever their motive to kill was in the first place so the kills usually pay for themselves. I've thought about this one for a long time now and besides the new death anchor feature the only thing I could think of to make this better is to actually increase the availability of kill and revival items.

A tangent on grave wreathes:

 

We now have the grave wreathes so we can gain a revival through some effort, I have personally put about 2,000 flowers directly into the wreathe combiner by walking from flower location to combiner and back each time and I can tell you it takes somewhere around 3 months to do this alone. Working in groups of two wouldn't make it much better as you are doing about the same thing just without the walking to the combiner since you can pass the flowers back and forth between eachother. The walking back and forth is the most tedious and limiting factor, not the availability of the flowers themselves. To explain what I mean... You get the daily regen of flowers, you can double the rate you harvest them with two players each using a basket but this doesn't increase how many flowers there are to collect in an area overall, you will need to cover more of the realm to increase how many flowers you collect. Doing this alone by walking back to the combiner is very grueling if you want to collect at a pace faster than the 3 months that I posit. Working in groups makes it easier but it is still unlikely considering the 10 minute wait time for each flower, you may still need to spend hours each day between a few people to trim those months down to weeks. Then there is always the possibility of depletion completely halting the process of collection.

Overall, I think the number of 1,000 flowers is not a bad amount by itself. If a group had a headstart at collecting flowers it may be simply days between a death and revival due to an already mostly finished wreathe. Although if grave wreathes are the only revival method at your disposal it is woefully inadequate if you expect to revive more than just one person in a short time peroid.

I understand kill and revival tools being exclusive and not giving just everyone them, but we already have independent harvesting tools alongside public tools and the independent ones are mostly for convenience, kill/revival tools can be used in a similar way. I'm proposing making a "shared tool" equivalent of kill and revival methods, very similar to what the grave wreathes provide now but in more abundance. If these tools need to be worked towards through significant resource usage or similar effort then it can provide a counterbalance to the independent kill/revival methods in that no single tool can create a monopoly of power. This will allow those who don't have tools to be able to fight fire with fire against killers as well as help provide more revival methods that can't be shut down by any single countermeasure, such as depletion of the realms herbs. This would also allow more free usage of these mechanics as a whole instead of it just being an offhand thing we have to deal with every few months, it will be a legitimate gameplay mechanic we can always be on our toes about.

Edited March 27, 2019 by Mallos

[Fang Archbane]

Heres a fun and ridiculous idea. How about every point in Dead loyalty reduces the Dead players regen timer by 1 minute. Since theres only 1440 minutes in a day, it isnt completely out of the question that a dedicated Dead player could reach 1440 loyalty and bring their regen timer down to 1 second. At that point, even the tiny and seemingly insignificant amount of AP the Dead get off said timer resetting would allow them to traverse the land and enjoy MD as they see fit. Death wouldnt be a player controlled jail at that point, some grit and determination would turn Death into just another way to play MD. Different rules, different perspective, same old world we love.