There are many ways death could work in MMOs...

Death is a hard subject to get nailed down. Too much of a penalty, and people will QQ Ragequit and refuse to play; too little of a penalty, and you effectively use Death as a fast-travel mode and/or Zerg method to kill bosses.

Death should always be something that is an undesirable consequence, but it should also never be a source of unreasonable frustration, such as the potential of losing everything because you are not able to recover your equipment.

My solution: When you die your spirit pops out of your body, and you have a few options:

Option 1: Find, or wait for a player to resurrect you.
Option 2: A sort of "Self Resurrection" item that is either bought (micro transaction), or earned through completion of difficult or long quests and achievements.
Option 3: Resurrect at your home point, but suffer a substantial XP loss and a stat debuff that effectively puts you out of commission for a period of time. (After a period of time, inaction will cause this to happen by default.)
Option 4: Find an NPC that deals with these sorts of things such as a Necromancer, Shaman, or Cleric that will resurrect you at the cost of a Signficant Fee, Stat Debuff, and/or "Mini" Quest. Compared to resurrecting at home, you are basically paying for the convenience of resurrecting close(r) to where you died.

When you die.. I would like to see you become part of the Ghost World.. which in turn offers a new way to play the game. Maybe when you die there is some quests you can do while your dead? And let's face it, just having to repair your armor does not really effect the players. I have seen people do stupid things when there is no penalty at all for death. I am all for corpse runs in the normal world.. but the idea of giving someone else the power to drag your corpse... by a complete stranger... is a bad idea...

The fear of death adds an element missing from MMORPS, Bring That Fear!

Woot! So I think the corpse run. its a royal pain in the tookas.. but only that..

So, I voted for corpse recovery. However, my answer is not only corpse recovery, but also exp penalty that you only get back if you are rezed.

EQ1 really had that right, and there are a lot of reasons why, in my personal opinion. Though some of them are no longer valid in EQN. For example, having certain-class only rezes may be a problem if changing classes is easy or quick.

There should be serious death penalties for several reasons:

1. A sense of danger. The need for this cannot be overstated!!

2. Preventing foolish behavior. People are less likely to act like fools if they know there are serious ramifications for doing so.

3. Increased community through needing the help of others.

4. No more "death jumping" to pass content by.

5. Corpses littering an area are a great cue that there is something vewwy, vewwy dangerous stalking nearby!

6. This keeps people in the game/ at keyboard during downtime. If you could come back to a major CR, are you seriously going to just trundle off to make a sandwich, or zone out and watch some TV? No.

7. It slows people down.

8. It encourages the use of skill and makes people stop and really THINK. Skill be expected and good group behavior mandatory if you don't want your corpse lost in the depths of a deep, dark, dank hole (nothing pervo intended).

9. Related to number one, a HUGE sense of satisfaction and reward can only come from feeling genuine danger and overcoming what feels like REAL odds.

10. Because when you could possibly lose months of work, that feels like a "real" penalty. Instead of only potentially losing 10 minutes to run back, you could lose months of equipment... suddenly playing well and treating others well feels like it matters--and accomplishments now feel "real", too.

11. When you get good gear, it matters. Now you feel like you have something to protect--and something that it matters if you lose it. The emotional experience is intensified on every level by penalties that feel "real."

I had written a post about this somewhere else. I'm going to see if I can locate it again. BRB.

A reasonable death penalty, one that is just harsh enough to make you not want to die, makes the successes even better.

It's one of those things, in order to have your highs be high, there needs to be at least a possibility that your lows will be low.

Regardless of what the death penalty is, it is always able to be made up with no input other than time - since that is the only thing we put in to the game. I would rather see us able to make up that penalty on our own time, so I vote for it to be solo - but I don't get how experience loss or de-leveling would work in EQN...

I dont think that De-leveling is fair.. you could really hurt yourself if you are a solo player that has rotten luck..

Back in the day I would have probably voted harsher penalty, but having a job, family, and less play time (though I still have a lot, just not as it was back in the day), and don't want to spend all day making up for a say bad group, ect.
The harsh penalty was fun back in the day, every fight get that heart rate up, but anyone that's done a few CR in the planes probably doesn't like them much.
So I'm going with the lesser the better, but something to make not dying count needs to be there, small penalty, or the ghost corpse run isn't bad. Having a stat reduction for a time, also sucks.

I voted for corpse runs as well, personally. I like the idea, and I do think it should be combined with XP loss/loss of level. Just bring back the EQI death mechanics. Also, I am sad to see the third option of XP loss/loss of level combined with equipment damage - EQII has an equipment damage system nowadays, and more often than not you die because you want to travel somewhere faster. *eyeroll* My worry is people are going to vote for that and they're going to see 'Oh, people want it to be just like EQII!'.

I implore anyone voting to go for the most hard lined answer they can stand, because we know how Sony is with their polls.

MAKE THE GAME DANGEROUS AGAIN. Make us fear dying!

I agree, What are your thoughts on De-leveling?

have to repair armor. 1/3 reduction of armor per death. some downtime for death affects, which don't allow you to move round all that much. You won't want to move around much because if you die while in that state, it doubles the time and effectiveness of the debuff.

No corpse runs. Was always kind of a bad idea.

This won't cripple your ability to play and won't cost you an arm and a leg.

In red, this is exactly what I thought when I read that option.
I voted for it, simply because I wanted SOME penalty.

I wonder how de-leveling would work exactly, considering the tier system. You don't grind XP to level - you perform X number of actions or whatever. One of their examples was perhaps acquiring a full set of TierX gear. How do you lose a tier from that, and how do you go back up? Acquire another set?

that first option seems to me, they may have that hardcore server so many people want

No XP loss and absolutely no de-leveling. A death penalty should shouldn't be too harsh, it should be undesirable and come with some sort of penalty: like minor loss of time, in-game currency and gear durability. Not something that frustrating that it would make people quit the game.

There are several "hard core" MMOs out there for those who want such features. Also, there's absolutely nothing stopping people from role-playing harsh penalties if they so desire, they could even completely delete their character in case it dies even once. Unless of course, they aren't that "hard core" or "old school" after all!

The issue isn't the cost of death. It's a balance between the inevitability of death AND the cost of it.

A careful player should be rewarded for being careful. A reckless character should be rewarded for his risk. There is no balance to be found between the two if there is no penalty for risk.

Nobody wants to feel like they were cheated. Random deaths being very bad is very bad.

The solution isn't to reduce the death penalty, but rather reduce the situations in which players have little to no control over their survival.

I'm on the fence between High personal penalty and 'minor penalty / time sink' While people 'fondly remember' corpse runs in EQ... they're only fond when they're far removed. I know countless people back in the day who quit the game over 18+ hour corpse runs in plane of fear, lost gear, etc. It's not actually fun when you really have to do it.

I think that the way that EQ1 is doing it currently, no corpses / corpse run, but an XP loss is a fairly ok way to do it. I'd say add equipment damage to that, but remove the de-leveling aspect (xp loss only down to a floor of 0% in level) and you'd have a fairly workable compromise.

My reasoning on the xp loss cap is that currently in many games some classes, by virtue of their roll, die a whole lot more than others. Tanks in eq1 whose whole job is to take a beating until you die and the next tank steps in, are an example where they will, with xp loss, have a lot more 'work' to stay at the same level as the others they play with.

Removing 'delevling' or 'unding' would also simplify required level items. No one likes getting a shiny new item, dying,a nd then not being able to use that item (and perhaps no longer having their old item to use while they 'regrind' their level back up to use the item)

Secret World has a great ghost run. I would not mind seeing something like that again

could be a delevel of the X amount of time there was a soft save. Lets say your progress in the last 15-20 minutes is rolled back on death. Thats a good amount of time.

Sounds exactly like EQII's system. I can't say I agree with that at all - people mainly just use it to fast travel. Repairing armor isn't much of a deterrent.