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DicheBach

Hardcore Servers? Or, "The Lamentations of a Dead is Dead Gamer"

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If you are at all familiar with the Bethesda games forums, you may have encountered a special term that arose from a not uncommon "play style" shared by a small but not rare group of players: "Dead is Dead." I'm not sure if this play style emerged with Morrowind, but it certainly was in full swing with Oblivion and Skyrim, and has been played a lot in Fallout 3 and 4 as well.

At first it is important to point out that: this is not about chest-beating or bragging rights. Not at all. Indeed, many a sufferer of the Dead is Dead Neurosis will lament with full self-awareness how silly and masochistic they are about such games. Being able to survive for 40 or 50 levels on hardest difficulty Fallout 4 is 'fun,' but it certainly is not something one would ever expect anyone to be impressed by, and I think that is a common sentiment among those suffering the affliction.

It starts I suppose when one attempts to 'get into' a character and play that pixel entity in a believable way sticking to coherent themes and patterns. It evolves then into a desire for that character to strive for glory or success in the imaginary game world, but to NOT DIE. If one is at all susceptible to the playstyle, then once one tries it, one finds it always allures forever more, and one's capacity to enjoy the more typical "never-ending stream of respawns and body looting [interspersed only with the chopping sounds of a recently respawned player character avatar butchering its just decased counterpart in game . . . gotta prevent that good meat and skin from gong to waste!] diminishes progressively. The idea of always being able to start over no matter how chicken-brained a mistake you make, and the realization that: this is NOT really much less tedious than just starting over from Level 1 and trying to play smarter next time becomes hard to avoid.

So I've been having a good time with Atlas, up around 100 hours. Have played on quite a variety of servers (including 20 or 30 hours from a spawn into Federation controlled territory on the NA PVP server), but I've been increasingly annoyed at how damn easy it is to die in the game. Most recently I was playing on OTHGs PVE server and had the bad luck to pick a really badly infested island with minimal strategic resources. I finally decided it just wasn't fun when in the span of 20 minutes I had to fight off 2 cobras, 2 tigers,  and a Manta from attacking . . . not me, but my Fucking COTTAGE (attached to my small shipyard). I thought I'd have a go at playing singleplayer hardcore mode but!  . . . with settings dialed to make the stupidly easy deaths from malnutrition, getting overheated or chilly, and being bumrushed by tigers perhaps less common. 

I was surprised when I was able to level up past level 8 on the starter island (that must be a server setting) and even more surprised when I started to encounter high level "boss" mobs that yielded enormous XP and seemingly good unique loot. First one was an AB Alpha Loot Cat, and then there was an Alpha chicken (vanilla). With the settings I was using I was able to take out an average Level 7 or 10 pig with one or at most two spear throws at the face, but these Alphas were taking 5, 6, even 8 or 9 spears.

Then I encountered the end game: a Level 250 AB Alpha Loot Pig. I put 10 spears into his face, and fled back to my cottage for more ammo. I managed to put a couple more into him, but then he managed to hit me . . . one-shotted straight to hell.

I think I probably had things dialed up a BIT too high, but actually not terribly. I can summarize the main settings I imposed if anyone is interested.

But the main thing I feel like I learned was: playing with player stats buffed to make dying from stupid shit less common but with hard core mode is a real prospect, possibly even on a PVE server with a coop focus. I'm not sure how it would fly on a PVP server.

I'm curious if there is any interest at all in any of this in this community.

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Guest Astarlo

Not a bad idea but need to change the mechanics of capturing and destroying buildings / ships, because after the dead there will be a lot of trash.  If we add the offspring mechanic (1-2 children) it would be interesting to be reborn in them.  In the meantime, it would be nice to add a respawn timer or a strong debuff on death, but poop eaters will be against 😉

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7 hours ago, Guest Astarlo said:

Not a bad idea but need to change the mechanics of capturing and destroying buildings / ships, because after the dead there will be a lot of trash.  If we add the offspring mechanic (1-2 children) it would be interesting to be reborn in them.  In the meantime, it would be nice to add a respawn timer or a strong debuff on death, but poop eaters will be against 😉

The issue you are referring to on capturing and destroying buildings being that: when someone dies all their claims are belong to us type thing? I'm not sure I follow . . .

The children thing or "descendants" more generally is always an interesting prospect for "Dead is Dead, but not completely." They way this dynamic plays out in a game like Crusader Kings is quite nice, lots of unintended and emergent effects!

As far as the "poop-eaters," yeah well . . . there will be those who take no interest at all in a server that was configured in this way, and they can go their own way. If people take an interest in it, great, if not, no harm done, just move along . . .

I was describing these sentiments to some folks on some servers I've been playing on and one fellow commented that he had encountered a lot of players who felt this way, i.e., that leaned toward a Dead is Dead playstyle. The obvious thing with a game like this one is: you spend SO MUCH time and effort building up the skill and chattel, it would seem that PVP would be too brutal to even comprehend on Hardcore setting: one malicious sniper could turn an entire server into a basket case.

I think that, for PVP (and perhaps game play in general) what might be more suited to this particular game than an absolutely hardcore "Start over from scratch at level 1" would be something that combined a number of effects:

1. When you die, you enter into an altered state called "Resurrected," and this persists for a duration defined by a "Resurrection Timer." Ideally this could be configured differently for the server/user settings desired from anywhere from 1 to 100 in-game days. When you become Resurrected, you experience a number of effects.

 A. You respawn at a Freeport naked with all Expereince, skills and stats returned to zero.

 B. Claims and property undergo an accelerated "decay" so that effectively you are likely to lose a good deal of your property (not sure how fast that should be, and obviously if you are in a multi-player corp then this might be irrelevant unless the whole player base of the tribe is wiped out.

C. As long as you are well-nourished and not hot/cold you gain XP at an enhanced rate for a period of time after you die and are reborn?

D. While resurrected you experience much enhanced resistance to player aggro, but also do much diminished damage to other players. I'm not sure if any of the pre-existing config parameters could address this, but the idea is to discourage the player running right back into the fray and instead, actually starting over focusing on PVE to level up and regain status.

3. If you die AGAIN before this timer is completed, then you go into a "Path to Damnation" state in which (when reborn the second time) you experience (ideally) a range of effects. The idea of this is that you are "one-step" away from becoming a member of the "Damned" faction in game, and if you die again, that is what will happen. The character is no longer playable (and ideally would actually become a "Sailor of the Damned" boss in the game world)

I don't have enough familiarity with the game to speculate on what sorts of effects could be imposed during this "On the Road to Hell" status . . .

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