What really boggles my mind about the proponents of the experience penalty is that they think that a measure which will encourage people to play the game less is somehow healthy for the server. I also don't at all agree with the sentiment that there needs to be an extra penalty for pvp death. You're already losing all your mana, gear, and buffs. This means in order to get back to your full potential you need to med, buff, and run back to your corpse, otherwise you're just fodder.
Furthermore I don't see an experience penalty being a huge deterrant for people who are going to play here. I speak from experiences such as being in plane of fear and watching guilds train each other back and forth for hours on end until one of them finally gave up and went to sleep. I DO expect that this will be an extra mechanic for griefing, as if everquest really needed one more.
I also don't believe that stating in the rules that training is frowned upon will have any legitimate impact on a server where there is not 24/7 gm policing.
My opinion of the experience penalty on death is that it's just extra grief. Most of the time when people die in pvp they are in a dungeon so they are typically running minimally one or two zones back to loot their corpse which equates typically to around 5-10 minutes. Casters will also be forced to med and buff which typically equates to another 10 minutes. If you add experience penalty to death which is the equivalent of the experience you would get for killing one mob you're probably adding another 10 minutes.
Each pvp death with an exp penalty now equates to potentially 30 minutes of downtime IF you are only killed in pvp the one time which I think we can all admit isn't typically the case.
a hypothetical with exp penalty: group A rolls into guk and wants to steal a camp from single player B. A risks nothing and slaughters B. B comes back to loot corpse and A kills him again. B has now lost 40-45 minutes of his time. B has the option of either going back to A to risk another 15-20 minutes or logging off.
a hypothetical without exp penalty: group A rolls into guk and wants to steal a camp from single player B. A risks nothing and slaughters B. B comes back to loot corpse and A kills him again. B has now lost 30-35 minutes of his time. B has the option of either going back to A to risk another 5-10 minutes or logging off.
It's great to assume that experience penalty on death is going to prevent bind rushing (which is typically a non factor anyway as I've personally never seen any large guild who wins a pvp fight die to the guild they just steamrolled coming back with less powerful characters) but I'm certain that the reality will be that the level of grief people experience will just be increased.
|