You should lose Vista or Linux instead of XP when you die. I'm sure people would have mixed feelings about it, though.

I think the current system is fine, barring that my opinion is that the current abilities which sidetrack experience loss need that changed. Also, I notice with this system that any moondancer who was trans moon and died would then suffer the major problem of not being able to moonburst any more, relegating them to nature curse. This, coupled with the stat loss suggested would leave moondancers doing over 50% less damage for the duration of the death sickness. But yes, I think the current system is fine. No World of Warcraft like system plz

and yes, I haven't the time nor the willpower to read the previous seventeen+ pages.

Which already completely nullified this post. Skill lost went off the table a long time ago.

Hear hear!

Does not nullify the argument that the current death system is fine with the exception of xp-free deaths.

I love how people mention xp-free deaths, but refuse to also mention deaths where xp-loss is decreased.

Vitae, Conglutinations, and Immolation only please.

Correct. It's entirely too easy to get 99/100, and exp loss has been nerfed to almost nothing, especially compared against other realms.

How exactly would it ever not be easy? All you really need to do is repeatedly press a few keys, once you get to your preferred bashing spots (also easy, typically). Increasing the XP required certainly doesn't make it harder, it just means there are fewer people willing to spend the time getting it. And I can't see them doing anything else to change how people level.

I agree gaining experience over time already proceeds at a reasonable rate in game, and removing experience loss will have more of a psychological effect than a tangible one. That doesn't nullify the improvement this change would make.

I feel experience is an overall measure of accomplishment in the game - it dictates your level of skill, survival, power and relative position to other players. As such, losing it for taking on a tough challenge and failing while gaining it continuously for onerous and easily repeated menial tasks devalues the whole basis upon which your success in the game is perceived. This is also the reason why I was so passionately for removing all xp racial penalties - you cannot predicate all rewards upon a system which is an inequal or unfair measure of it.

I think a death penalty of lowered characteristics is a wonderful idea for improving Lusternia - it may not completely solve certain problems or be absolutely necessary (and I don't intend to argue otherwise), but that doesn't mean it isn't still a wonderful idea. I'd actually prefer something tailored to the means of your death rather than a blanket disfavour-effect, perhaps in the vein of a mobdeath causing temporarily decreased or removed ability to initiate bashing, and a pkdeath causing temporarily decreased or removed ability to initiate pk. It would also be nifty to have more of an rp-consequence to dying, such as a ghost-like state persisting for a while after your death which causes these penalties, which could then be mitigated in length of time by resurrection skills. Delays in being able to rush back into the same activity immediately after failing are a good thing, and that's one area where xp-loss fails to be significant, so this would open up potential for more meaningful death, in my opinion.

If a delay or penalty is too much to bear, what would it mean to give players the choice? Either they could wait with the ghost penalty, or resurrect immediately with significant xp loss. Sort of like saying that if you are willing to be patient and learn from the failure, you won't retrograde, whereas if you aren't, you will. At least that gives people the freedom to play the game as they like. I also would suggest that the whole enemy/non-enemy zone distinction be almost entirely removed if this change goes in. Too many artificial rules makes the act meaningless - if defences are not enough to give defenders an advantage, then penalizing the aggressors' deaths is not the answer - improving the defences is.

The companion change that would be nice in addition to removing xp-loss on death might be some sort of experience rate modifier that decreases the gain received for doing the same thing over and over again. For instance, killing the first goat of the day might give full xp, killing the next one might give 95% of the experience, killing the next one might give 90% of the experience, and so on, until the next day (or even week, up to the designers) rolls around. A logarithmic decrease down to a very low value might be best. This could also apply in a lesser fashion to influence, and maybe even to pk in a more drastic, linear way - ie, something like 100% down to 50% down to 0% for the third kill in the same time period (interesting thought - down to negative xp gain for more kills?). Quests as well, for that matter. The idea being that just doing the same thing over and over again will still net you gains, but not as much as actually trying different methods and challenges.

All in all, I am very, very impressed by the courage and sensitivity of the admin in putting this up for debate. Lusternia is definitely in phenomenally adept and adorable hands, it seems.

/voice from the grave

...what he said x100.

Though with the suggestion of optional xp loss I still don't know why people are against it.

Also this post has made me think just how unfair praying is, you sit around for the entire sequence and lose the (second?) most xp of all deaths, no wonder there is no love for it.

I think if everyone congluted on their turf (Celestines on Celestia, and Water, Mags on Nil/Earth, ect.) this would be more then enough to prevent the "I hate praying" business. Ever since I got conglut, dying on defense means absolutely nothing. I sitll think we should not conglute sans trans planar everywhere else though.

What we could do instead is change the free ripple/flux/liveforest constructs and make them into free conglut constructs. This would be much better for everyone.

But killing them / deactivating them would be griefing the people without conglut.

Of course, there are usually better constructs to kill... I know our Immolation construct wasn't targeted, which is the same sort of thing.

Experienced IRE player just starring out in Lusternia, if I have made any incorrect assumptions I just ask that you are gentle when you correct me.

Keeping the complexity of coding any change, as well as a desire to have a change fit in with the flavor of Lusternia in mind how about the following:

When you die you lose X% of your power reserves, if you have less than X% you lose all of your remaining power with the rest coming out of your experience with a total possible experience loss capped at around (or even more) what it is today. Current exp loss mitigators could either be removed or changed to reduce the overall power loss (i.e. Conglutination could make it X/4 or whatever).

The balance would be in finding a good level for X. If it was less than dross everyone would get one "free" death a day. If it was more than 100 (ouch!) death would be even worse than now. If you wanted you could also scale X based on number of deaths in the past hour. Starting it out low, at like 5, and then doubling it with each death up to a cap.

As power is so unique and central to Lusternia I just thought that finding a way to link it into a death system would be good. This also would give power an additional meaning which would force players to add to their strategic thinking when spending it.

PvE
In PvE power is not -as vital- as PvP, thus keeping some in reserve to "pay for death" would be a reasonable stragey. In addition you could choose to hunt for power to build up a buffer. If you die your PvE is impacted only slightly unless you take a risk and hunt without a power reserve. This would also require you to decide if you wanted to risk using up that last bit of power to finish off something, or if you would just play it safe and take the "free" death. Death when you had power would slow down your overall bashing efecincy but it would not take away any of your prior effort.

PvP
In PvP power use is going to be more important, and it is going to be used more by those who have higher level skills. New-Mid players who want to participate might not even use any power, just keeping their dross reserves around as a way to "pay for death". While the more advanced players would have to judge how they spent their power. Organizations would need to decide how much power debt various players could use. Even if someone was allowed an unlimited draw, their deaths would still take time, thus taking them away from the battle, and if they wanted to avoid exp loss even more time as they linked.

This would have the affect of removing any loss from the first few deaths in a raid, while still giving the winning raid group the ability to overwhelm defenders to the point where they temporally win. In addition to achieving whatever other goal the raid has, they also would have caused a net loss in power to the defenders if they all chose not to take the exp loss.

You currently lose all your power when you die. (Or are you talking about power reserves?)

I am specifically talking about reserves.

So if you have 10 power and 10% in reserve (full dross), with my method above and X set to 5%, after you died you would come back with 10 power and no reserves (for a total loss of 20 power). You would not lose any experience in this situation, but if you died a second time without regaining any of your reserves you would lose up to the exp cap as you would be at 0% in reserve. You would then return to life with 0 total power.

I do not know what a balanced value for X would be, but it seems like 5 is a good starting point.

I apologize if my wording was confusing, I was not sure exactly how people phrased it.

Thing about losing that much power on death, some classes are very power heavy, and if they lost power each time they died, they'd effectively be neutered, while other classes would not be.

As a Celestine, I'd rather lose XP then power.

Folkien's random 7-step complete recoding of the death system! (Also a possible fix to the horrid raid balancing we tend to find ourselves facing these days... but really, just food for thought)


1. Make souls able to rez themselves by coming in contact with their nexus or another point of interest on the higher planes.

2. Give people full mana when they die. Make it to drain over time, with the rate based on their level and plane on which they died.

3. People lose a fraction of the XP they would normally lose from their death, this fraction based on how much mana they lost while walking to their revive point.

4. Build a massive Spirit Plane, which is a plane I've been wanting to see more of since Tosha first came out...

5. Souls can SPIRIT SHIFT, bringing them to the Spirit Plane, where they can hunt/influence in a modified manner. Winning against mobs or completing quests gives mana. Souls can also shift back to where their spirits were originally located.

6. Gaining mana up to double your normal amount will revive you (quadruple if your corpse has been consumed in some way?) as an alternative to adventuring for twenty minutes to find a revive point.

7. Resurge adds mana to a soul, lich brings life back immediately (maybe causing death if mana reaches zero, but allowing the lich to venture to the Spirit Plane as well?), Sacrifice trades life for mana, lastrites, violet and kether all drain mana... etc. Other skills would be added in planar and discipline to help with adventuring in the spirit planes. Not sure what would happen to conglut...

Sounds great for active players, but will be terrrible for casual players.

What happens when you reach 0 mana? Do you then have to go through the death sequence ALSO?

Also, I would hope you can gain more than just mana in the spirit plane, but also gold xp karma etc, and not justt have it be another version of some wierd death quest.