Getting a Grip on the Grave

The Effects of Death in EverQuest 2

by: Tony "RadarX" Jones

MMO guru Raph Koster, in his book "A Theory of Fun" defines a game as "learning in a safe environment."  I'll admit before this week I never really tried to define what a game was but it in a profound way it mirrors real life.  Certain activities are rewarded while others are punished, and we develop patterns of behavior based on it.  For example, taking down the trash cans to the curb the night before, earns me a "Thank you sweetheart" from my wife as reward.   Not taking the trash cans to the curb the night before, and missing garbage pick up, earns me weeping and gnashing of teeth.



Lets move this example to EverQuest 2.  You speak to a Non-Player Character, and are given a task to destroy 11 goblins.  You seek out these goblins, who are of an appropriate level, and use your abilities succesfully killing them.   Returning to the NPC who gave you the task provides you with a reward, whether it be experience, money or an item.  This appeals to you, so you learn a pattern.  Find NPC, go complete task, reap uber lootz.   What happens however, when you walk into a zone with Nagafen the level 100 impossible to kill dragon and attack him?  This is a task not  completed in a manner the game deems acceptable, so you die.   Well you don't really die, but your avatar does, and this is the deterent to unacceptable behavior defined by the game mechanics.

Discussing Death

How does death work in EverQuest 2? First dying gives you what is referred to as "experience debt" or what my regular group likes to call "A night with Radar (ask them if you don't believe me)." This experience debt reduces your experience gain by a factor undefined by SOE, but it has a noticeable effect.  You won't gain experience at a normal rate until you have earned enough experience at this reduced rate to satisfy the debt. 

In the days of yore (which was 2005), SOE used a method similar to EverQuest 1 in which a "spirit shard" was left behind when you died.  You didn't have to recover said shard, but if you didn't, you suffered a significanlty larger penalty of experience debt.  There is frequent debate surrounding whether this was a good idea, but in the end SOE decided the game was better off without it.

The other deterrance dying gives you, is damage to your equipped items. Each death will accumulate 10% damage to your items (heritage items are 5%), and at 0% they will become totally unusable. Fortunately, there are semi-convientiently placed menders throughout Norrath who will repair your equipment for a fee. While it can be a little bit of a walk to find them, it usually takes very little time to get you back in working order.

Is it Enough?

I can see you thinking "Wow thanks there Captain Obvious, for reminding us of what happens when we die. Get to the point." We go back to the game is learning theory. In order for us to fully experience learning, there needs to be a valid deterent for failure. If the deterent isn't sufficent, then the learning process is skewed.

Let me clarify this with an example. As it stands now, lets say we have a monk named Savanja. Now, Savanja is extremely fond of jumping off from high places whether its because of the safe fall ability or some fascination with falling. Now currently, it costs Savanja 1 gold piece and 1% experience debt every time she dies. Well Savanja has a lot more than 1 gold piece. In fact, she has a few hundred gold pieces, and in a decent group 1% experience debt can be worked off in twenty minutes. What is to deter Savnja from jumping off a cliff when Radar is clearly auto folowing her? Nothing at all. There is no real deterent, and this can lead to a mindset of invincibility and ultimately ruins the gaming experience similar to using "god mode" on a console game.

What Can be Done?

There has been heated debate on what should be done about death in EverQuest2 and which direction SOE should go with it. On one end of the spectrum you have the purists, who would have us doing two hour corpse runs or we'd lose all our equipment like in EverQuest 1. On the other hand, you have the casual players who are going to inherently get killed in the middle of a group of heroic monsters 10 levels above them and be unable to retrieve their corpse who don't have two hours. Yet another group of players are satisfied with the system in place and would prefer things left alone.

I find myself a bit torn in the middle. As a long time player of EverQuest 1, I remember the panic of retrieving my corpse at the bottom of a dungeon or risking losing it all. I remember it being bad enough you had to find a necromancer to summon your corpse. I don't think it should really should come to that. EverQuest 1 was a trend setting MMO and times were different then. The growth of MMO's has ushered in a new generation of players that aren't used to the archaic methods we loathed at the time, but now reminisce about.

My Thoughts

What would Radar do? It warms my heart that you asked. Armor degradation for death is about where it should be in my opinion. A bad night can see your group wiping 3 to 5 times and very few people walk around with their armor in full repair. Perhaps armor repairs can be more expensive. It only costs me 2 to 3 gold pieces to repair 20% damage and that type of money can be made easily in less than an hour. Scale the cost based on the rarity of the equipment. That fabled set of uber raiding gear should cost a small fortune to maintain.

Increase experience debt, but only slightly. I can hear the angry villagers gathering pitchforks and torches as I type this. The experience debt doesn't feel significant enough to warrant a deterrent against dying in my opinion. Sure the casual player might have a little more trouble with debt playing 90 minutes a day versus the hardcore player who plays 4-6 hours a day. At the end of the day, however, especially at the lower levels, debt (and mistakes) seemed to be erased far too easily and some casual players may not be taking vitality into account.

Overall, this subject seems kind of morbid, so I'd tell a knock-knock joke at this point to lighten it up if I didn't feel so strongly about all this. I think there is far too little in the way of understanding of basic game mechanics such as deterrance but other people would disagree with me. Whatever your opinion of the death system in EverQuest 2, its obvious some people feel its killing the game. Get it? Killing. Wait, I said no jokes didn't I?

Comments or Questions? Feel free to email me.