Forums: Developer Talk

UPDATE – see the September Announcement for details on the changes to defeat in battle.

At the end of May, I made some changes to the way “death” works in-game (see: Losing Battles and Fleeing from Battles). These changes reduced the items you lose when you die to only the items you have equipped. They also introduced the ability to flee from a battle and lose skill points rather than equipment.

Now, even with the option to flee, you don’t always make a clean getaway and many players are losing hard earned equipment when they find themselves in a tough fight. I realize that it’s frustrating to lose equipment; especially items gained as a reward for a mission. Here are the options on how we might change it – please, everyone, I’d love to hear your opinions. And if you have friends who might not be active in the game anymore because they were frustrated, I’d really like to hear from them as well.

Option A: flag rewarded items as undroppable. What this would mean is that a reward item could not be lost in battle, nor could it be sold (or bought) in any market. To make up for not being able to lose it in a battle, there may be a gold loss penalty in place of the loss of the item.

Option B: Everything stays as it is now, but there is some way to get your lost item back. Many ideas have been suggested for how this might happen: for example, make a way for your party to track down the party of NPCs that defeated you and re-fight them; go to a ‘guild’ in town that you can pay to recover an item for you; and so forth. The biggest problem with this option is it takes a lot more coding – mainly because the system will have to keep track of lost items somehow and (depending on the implementation) possible other information such as the NPCs who took the item originally.

Option C: Instead of losing equipped items, in the event of character death and a lost battle, skill points are lost – just like the way the “fleeing” feature works now. At the same time, the penalty for fleeing would be changed to gold loss (and the loss of Health, as it is now, would go away). The amount of gold lost would be proportionate to the skill levels of the player’s characters (most likely it would be a percentage of some kind, with a cap on the maximum you could lose). This amount of gold lost would also depend on the number of characters who fled during battle – characters who died would still lose skill points as stated.

In addition, since there is no longer loss of equipment for Option C, I would have to develop some kind of process for degrading equipment over time. Something like this: after winning a battle, each piece of equipment worn by characters has a small chance to degrade a small amount. If a character died during any battle, the chance of their equipment degrading is much higher (still a small degrade though). The degrade would be either a % loss of Damage or a % loss of Speed (probably randomized from 1-10%). With this concept, special items can actually still be sold on the market, but their value will go down over time, just like any other items.

Option C2: just like Option C, except instead of losing skill levels when you die, you lose gold, and instead of losing gold when you flee, you lose skill levels (those two penalties are reversed).

I’m really leaning toward Option C/C2, because I think it’s more fair, it’s a whole lot less frustrating, it makes more sense to me, and frankly it’s the easiest for me to implement. If we’re to go with Option C, then I will reset everyone’s mission statuses so you can all have a chance to go back and re-earn those special items you’ve lost.

One last note – in any of these cases, I’m going to be changing it so that you cannot have characters with less than 15 health join the Active party. If you finish a battle and any character has dropped below 15, they will be set to Inactive and you will have to replace them in order to proceed (remember, you cannot travel without four Active characters).

Thoughts?

I’m sorry, but I don’t agree with the C method. I hate losing skill points that take so damn long to accumulate. If there was a way to take out losing your skills points and replace it with a different penalty; such as gold loss, that would make me very happy lol.

I liked Option A: Flagging an item would be excellent cuz most of my items I could really care less about; it’s just those key ones that make me mad to lose lol. Also, the damage to the weapons idea is alright, but it would be cool to have a blacksmith or something to repair the item as well. You could make him expensive as well, then only the items that people really feel they want to keep will be fixed.

Option C is unacceptable. Skill points are difficult to earn, especially at the higher levels. Losing skill points when fleeing makes sense, because that is a conscious decision made by the player. Losing skill points when a character dies does not make sense, because that is out of the player’s direct control and happens whether the player wants it or not. I prefer the idea someone else suggested that items can be made ‘undroppable’ by the use of special gems that bind the item to the character. Perhaps the gems could have a ‘wear off’ chance, where each time the character dies, there is a chance (say, 10-50%, depending on how long the gem has been in effect and how many times the character has died with it) that the gem will fail. The item would not be lost that time, but unless a new gem is acquired and used to bind the item again, it will be lost next time the character dies. This gives players the ability to move the item from character to character, as well as sell the item, but guarantees that for at least one death the item is undroppable.

Yes, I see your points against C. I’ve added a fourth option, calling it C2 – where every thing is the same, except the penalties for dying and fleeing are reversed.

C2 is good. I don’t know that I like it best, but it does seem the most fair. I say go for it.

Option C2 is the best among the four, I say go with that one.

If you are smart and run when the odds are against you the penalty should be less than if you just stand and fight every time. There’s a fine line between bravery and foolishness and I think choice C addresses that. I vote for C.

C2 just sugar coats things and makes running away a harsher penalty than dying…in my opinion, dying should be a little worse than running away to fight another day…

Okay Lucifer, lets say you run away, and lose a couple skill points, maybe five at the most for each character. I would say that might be slightly better than losing a whole 100 gold by dying. (might I add that gold does not come by the thousands in this game)

Ok, before we get too far, I should clarify these options with some formulas and examples. I’m going to use option C for this example, but these same formulas would be used in C2 (just reversed).

First, the amount of gold you would lose for every character that flees would be a percentage, with a maximum:
| Best Active Skill Level for fleeing PC | percentage of gold lost | max gold loss |
| 20 | 1.0% | 13 gold |
| 30 | 2.25% | 30 gold |
| 40 | 4.0% | 53 gold |
| 50 | 6.25% | 83 gold |
| 60 | 9.0% | 120 gold |

The percentages and maximums in the table are additive. Let’s say you get into trouble and you have to flee with all four characters, and you’re top skill for each character is 30. That’s going to be a gold loss of 9% (2.25% x 4), with a maximum loss of 120 gold. So if you have 200 gold, you’re going to lose 18 gold. In that same example, let’s say that 2 of your characters died and the other two managed to flee. In this case, you’d lose 4.5% of your gold, or 9 gold of 200.

Now let’s examine skill point loss – this is going to be 5% across the board, just off your character’s Active skills. Rounded down, minimum of 1 point. So if a character has, for example, 30 in Long Blades and 25 in Fire, those two skills would be reduced to 29 and 24 respectively upon death. If a PC has 50 in Short Blades and 60 in Frost, those skills would be reduced to 48 and 57.

Most important to note, these penalties would only be applied in the case of total defeat. So if you want to play it safe and make a PC flee a fight because they are beaten down, and you manage to win the fight with your remaining characters, no gold loss would occur. Likewise, if one character goes down during battle but you are still victorious, that downed character would not suffer any skill loss.

With the numbers out in the open, I feel like option C makes the most sense. At lower levels, the penalties for both death and gold loss are pretty minimal as it wouldn’t make much difference, but at higher levels, you will be forced to make a choice if you get into a fight that’s over your head (and I think in most cases it’s easier to give up some gold by fleeing rather than lose skill points in death – higher level players accumulate gold at a much higher rate than lower level players).

Does this make sense? Does it seem fair?

If that is the same for C2 (only with the gold and skill loss on opposite occurences) then C2 would be good. However, after a few hours of thought, C and C2 seem about equal in my mind. Seeing that I hardly ever use gold at the moment, save for buying a wepon with a skill type that I do not already have (which is cheap enough to not matter at the moment) and my skills seem to be going up quite rapidly when I actually focus on raising them, either way would work for me.

And as I said people, this decision was after a couple hours of thought, my last few posts here were impulse-rantings.

In terms of real-life mechanics, C2 is more realistic than C (when someone dies in battle, the body is looted for items and money, not the mind for skills). Other than that, both C and C2 seem fair. Because I believe in a certain level of realism (even in fantasy games), I still think C2 is the better plan. A fantasy or sci-fi setting is far more believable when elements of realism are adhered to (such as the inherent greed of bandit-types when looting dead bodies). Gold (and items) should be lost upon death; skill points (i.e. the character’s self-confidence) when running away.

It would seem realistic to lose gold when you flee and lose skill points when you die.

When you flee gold would be dropped to speed up your retreat.

When you die you would return to life weakened.

If you must drop something when running away from an encounter, you are more likely to drop your equipment-in-hand or your cumbersome backpack (containing unequipped items and likely some gold) than you are to go digging in your pockets for a few gold coins to drop. While this is somewhat realistic, these measures would only be take in extreme emergencies, where your enemies could kill you (turn you into less than a grease smear on the pavement) in one turn or less. Any other time you run, you’re most likely up against someone who could kill you fairly easily but you’d do them some significant damage first. In that case, you’d just be scared out of your wits (and some skill points). Fleeing to avoid defeat therefore should result in skill-point loss.

When you return to life, you do return weakened. That’s why you start out with only 1% health and have to rest up. Your mind and skills have not necessarily deteriorated. Many games with respawning PCs do have a skill-point or XP penalty, but in those games you have to specifically request a respawn. In this game, respawning is instantaneous and automatic, resulting in less oxygen deprivation to the brain and body and thus preserving the same level of mind and skills. A dead body is looted, however, and a gold loss for death in the event of a total defeat is therefore quite reasonable.

with option b would only you be able to get your item? it would suck if some npcs were found by another player and he beat them down and got your items. i like that the best but if the coding is too hard i agree with c-2.