[MUD-Dev] Alternative team based approaches to game-play

[Vincent Archer]

According to olag at ifi.uio.no:
> Johan A:

>> EQ2 has its Group XP debt. Instead of people looking out for
>> eachother, people are now very reluctant to group with people
>> they don't know.  Unexperienced MMO players are already reluctant
>> to group and adding things like this only makes it worse when
>> they receive alot of abuse for messing up and causing harm to the
>> entire group.

> I didn't know about the group xp debt, so that was rather
> interesting. How does it work?

That's simple: EQ2 has two death penalties. When you die, you get a
10% damage to your equipment and valuables, which you need to repair
(at 0, the item stop working), and an XP penalty.

When you are in a group, just like positive XP is shared among group
members (when you kill stuff, everyone gains xp), so is the
negative.  When the overaggroing caster dies, everyone in the group
receives one sixth of the negative xp (and the person who dies
receives only one sixth of its xp penalty, of course).

> Wonder why they added that. Have the designers explained why?

The basic idea is that, in a group, some persons take usually more
risks. The tank is more likely to die. The healer has no choice
usually but to heal, so he can't control his aggro as well as the
other group members. The puller may get in hairy situations and
decide to die near the group rather than bring 11 mobs at the same
time.

These players should not be penalised for being more at risk than
the others, hence the shared penalty.

Of course, the prevalent thinking is that, if you're dying, you're
not doing your job well. The negative reinforcement (not only you
have to wait for the rez and regen, but you even lose xp) means
people are less tolerant of the "incompetent".

One of my friend during the beta had found a nice ledge at the edge
of a cliff to stay and camp after an evening's adventure. Once, he
said goodbye to his three partners, went, dropped a bit to the
ledge, and started to camp. Two seconds later, he got hit by 3 xp
debt, as the three others had followed him, thinking of getting back
to town, didn't see in the night where exactly they were, and just
jumped over the cliff at full steam and fell to their death.

He got a good laugh at first, but he was pretty much annoyed by an
almost complete death penalty. He learned the lesson: never remain
in a group, unless you are with the group!

--
	Vincent Archer			Email:	archer at frmug.org

All men are mortal.  Socrates was mortal.  Therefore, all men are Socrates.
							(Woody Allen)
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