Ease of death/PKill

Avanga said it best. It’s just too easy to die on LotJ. As a result of that, we lose good clan leadership, we get disjointed personal RP stories, and new players, or occasional players who are struggling to keep up die far too often, far too easily.

I say we either need to die less, or make it easier for players to bounce right back. What are your thoughts on this?

My only guess would be play your character more careful, have bigger account point distribution upon death or have races cost less points, I don’t know which is better.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with PK in and of itself, I’ve proven that a lackluster combatant can hold his own against lots of people – even forcers if they’re prepared for it. The problem is that more and more people resort to underhanded tactics to win these days. Boxing people in while they’re AFK, bringing large groups to fight one person, or blockading and shooting them down in space. A person doesn’t really stand a chance in any of those situations, no matter how good they are.

To a degree, it’s necessary. Characters become stale, and when they die it gives people the opportunity to explore new avenues of RP. It brings new life to the MUD. But like I said, in the odd case where it’s a leader, it can really mess things up.

What about easing up on dying in space?

OKAY, HOLD UP RP POLICE. I know that it’s not perfect RP to have someone die in space, and then pop up somewhere else. It’s not like we can’t change the death echo to make to sound like they’ve ejected in a life pod, or something silly like that. (It’s better than our current system of ICly-dies-then-gets-restored-and-backtracks-RP.)

Well, as people were talking about in the other thread, Forcers have a huge target painted on them at all times. I know they make up a minority of the pbase, but I still this it’s worth addressing… so I’m copying over the post I wrote there. It makes more sense here anyway.

No, I kind of agree with you there, Kora. Personally, I’d rather have a memorable death than getting picked off by a gank squad or blasted from orbit. Those tend to be the majority of the ways I’ve died on characters. I’ve had three forcers on this mud, two were blasted from space. The first one I had coming to me, and I felt justified in it. The second one was abrupt and unceremonious. It was one of the biggest disappointments I’ve ever experienced on LotJ.

I don’t think PKs need to be made more difficult. I would suggest to make it more rewarding to the person who gets killed, but that’s really coming down to the person(s) performing the perm and their quality of role play.

I know we have a "catch and release" rule which "makes you safe for X time" but I don’t think it’s highlighted enough and I don’t think there is enough incentive to let someone go afterwards. I’ve personally, and just very recently, invoked that rule myself, but I can almost garauntee that when those 2 weeks are up, I’m about to face the awesome powerz(TM) of the gank squad.

You need someone to scout orbit before you can launch when you’re at war, otherwise you never know if you’re launching into a trap. Autoeject on pubbies doesn’t do anything but vaporize you if they blockade, and any decent pilot -will-. People have expressed interest in a way to check for orbital ships, but nothing’s come of it yet. It’d be handy.

The other thing we could do is have it so people can be recovered after starfighter explosions through use of environmental suits or something. Rather than launching them to the planet, they drift in space and can be retrieved by ships. That’d require some work though, and it’d probably just lead to a death at the hands of your enemies anyways.

We could increase/improve the current cloning system.

Mechanically, cloning is a good solution. I think it needs to be tweaked, but we’ve used it before… it’s been widely popular regardless of it’s drawbacks.

RP-wise, it presents a lot of issues, but we can’t have everything our way. Besides, it’s just a game, and we can’t micromanage every aspect of people’s RP.

Clones enable players to choose to continue, or choose to end things with that incredible death sequence that they just experienced.

You can only expect people to enjoy that spectacular death RP that they may get if they’ve taken the time to get to know their characters and fall in love with them. If they’re killed after a few weeks, then they’re probably not bonding with their character to really appreciate it.

Kora: No one will flame you here. If they do, I’ll delete their posts. We need to have these discussions, and we can’t let the idiots tell us that our ideas are bad. That’s what brainstorming is all about. Throw a lump of clay on the table and work it into something wonderful.

I’m torn. A part of me wants to say that eject should go right through a blockade safely because being able to lock down a system is powerful enough. The other part of me likes that pods are the best way to survive a blockade, because they force people to consider using something other than public shuttles. I think pods should auto-crash land within 7000 range or so, though, just like ejecting.

I really dont have any problem with the ease of dying. It is somewhat realistic that way, and I almost allways play combatants and put myself in shitty situations that I still manage to live a good long while on most of them. What is shitty is being killed with little or no rp wether it be on the ground or even more likely in space. At the moment it is rediculously easy for the pilot of a capital ship to kill anything that isnt in a ship the same size as him. There is supposed to be an incentive to let people go but apparently that doesnt apply in space. It is also rediculously easy for them to figure out how many people are on a ship and what their names are. I mean come on, even with the death star they had to wait until they had captured the ship and even after searching they had to bring in an in ship scanning crew. It all may be a bit jumbled together but its my 2 cents.

Well the space thing all goes back to the space combat overhaul I requested a long while ago. Sounds as if Rojan touched on some of it but never got around to doing much with it. What I’d originally proposed was a system like this:

[b:3j63pmig]Starfighter > Capship > Midship > Starfighter

Starfighters[/b:3j63pmig] should be untouchable by capships – I mean, why not? They can SCRAMBLE MORE STARFIGHTERS (It’s why they’re called Interceptors, people!). This gives people in a starfighter enough time to escape, while giving the capship pilot a job that isn’t retardedly easy and, at the same time, not impossible (tractor them until you can scramble your starfighters or capture them).

[b:3j63pmig]Capships[/b:3j63pmig] would utterly demolish midships. This is made alright by the fact that midships have escape pods, and most midships won’t be crossing a capship anyways.

[b:3j63pmig]Midships[/b:3j63pmig] own starfighters because they have smaller turbolaser batteries meant to destroy smaller vessels. Maybe even remodel the Gunship class of ships so that they serve a purpose – destroying starfighters.

And the cycle continues on and on and on. That is how balance is made. Rock, scissors, paper.