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I think XP debt (especially if one doesn't get their TS back) and paying for repairs is punishment enough to players that are leveling. If the XP curve is harsh, then people aren't going to go around getting themselves killed constantly. It wasn't until F2P that they implemented rez sickness for under 50 players. It was another one of SOE's stupid decisions to give it to people across the board. However when they did it, you only got rez sick if you released. So if you were rezzed by a healer, you didn't get it.

For people that are grouping, they're probably going to be dungeon running. And I know from experience that sometimes when you wipe, the rest of the group doesn't have time or doesn't want to go back down into the belly of the dungeon to get their tombstones back. That is a hell of a punishment if people are leveling. So again, I don't really think it's necessary.

For people soloing, you're going to cause an imbalance of too many disciples, too few dpsers. If you want to make people worry about death, they're going to play the classes least likely to die. And the ones that can heal themselves have always had a huge advantage in that department. To me, that in itself, is imbalanced.

And then you get to raiders. These are people that are probably already top level. Now on the old VGplayers site... I used to check the old leaderboards quite a bit. And I'd always liked to see how many deaths or whatnot. And when you looked at the players with the most deaths, it was always the very top, hard core raiders. Because these guys are out there, pushing to learn the strats. And you don't learn the strats without getting hurt. A lot. As Q once told Picard in Star Trek TNG: "'If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross, but it's not for the timid."

And I feel like rez sickness trains people to be timid.

But if you give it to raiders, they're just going to wait it out, and the goal of the rez sick is lost anyway.

I guess what we should figure out first is: Why should we give people a rez sickness?

If it's to punish players for dying, then what controls do we give them to prevent it?

When I think of this, I think of GW2 and how every single strategy in the game is "run around like crazy and heal yourself", it's up to everyone to keep themselves alive. It's not coordinated. It's not fun. GW2 somehow managed to put the "I" in "team".

If I die because I pulled aggro, and got one shot, then I deserved that death. That teaches me not to do that.

If I die because there's an unavoidable AOE and my healer can't keep up, I don't feel like I deserved that death. Especially as Apaelias put it, one lucky crit and you're dead. What do I learn from that? What can I possibly learn from that? Oh, well, play a disciple and that won't happen. Well that's not the right attitude at all.

If you want to punish people for dying, make it part of the gameplay that we can do something about. Perhaps you should give them a rez sickness debuff if they don't get their tombstones. Or if they leave items in TS escrow (That was a 'bank' exploit).

But I really don't think we should punish people just because they died.

These are very good points and kinda what I was hinting at I think. I'm just poor with words.

[quote="Jakkal"]
If you want to punish people for dying, make it part of the gameplay that we can do something about. Perhaps you should give them a rez sickness debuff if they don't get their tombstones. Or if they leave items in TS escrow (That was a 'bank' exploit).
[/quote]

This, I think, is a great idea.

[quote="Jakkal"]
Perhaps you should give them a rez sickness debuff if they don't get their tombstones.
[/quote]

Don't expect to see tombstones since they were taken out before the network protocol change so we don't have any packet collects of how they work. We may be able to wing it and implement something like it but that would be later.

NOOOOOO!!!!!!

... That's a real bummer if TS's are taken out.

Just leave the corpse on the ground.

My client is from the pre-tombstone removal patches. I often get errors stating that I am removing peoples permission to drag my corpse. I'm also sure my client would generate any /corpse commands if you need them.

[quote="Jakkal"]... That's a real bummer if TS's are taken out.[/quote]
Moving backwards, how were you getting tombstones in the last 18 mos of the game if they were removed? I assume you are talking about a genuine, visible obelisk in the game that you walk up to and click to get your earthly remains back? If those were taken out by SOE, how will we bring them back? Alternate suggestions are welcome. Maybe some other object (if we cannot find the graphic), for instance. Functionality-wise, I think we can do it using LUA scripting on the object (speculating)

[quote="Jakkal"]Now on the old VGplayers site... I used to check the old leaderboards quite a bit. And I'd always liked to see how many deaths or whatnot. [/quote]
This is coming back, if I can help it Loved the leaderboards (stats whore, I am)

[quote="Jakkal"]But I really don't think we should punish people just because they died.[/quote]
I disagree with the entire philosophy that "rez sickness = punishment for dying", or any kind of punishment. "Punishment" to me means you did something wrong and are in trouble, scolded, bad, bad player. It might have felt like a punishment, and saying it 1,000 times might make it true but I seriously doubt SOE designers sat in a room and said "When players die, they should pay for their incompetence."

I can guarantee someone exploited the death system (players are very clever) and over time, a very simple [immersion] tactic turns into a weapon. As I said, and it was probably glossed over, Dying and being Brought Back To Life seems like it should be a traumatic experience, in any reality. That's really the only reason I believe in it. Though I do not believe SOE's implementation will be ours; because it sounds like it was more harsh than it needed to be (and full of bugs).

Lots of great ideas here around how to solve this, and make it better, including ditching it altogether. You don't have to sell me on removing Rez Sickness from our game. As with Furious, you just have to give me something to replace it with, or define a different set of parameters that are acceptable, and not concern yourself (anymore) with what SOE did. We're not SOE. We're here to help.

I remember someone mentioned that TS's were going to be taken out, but I don't remember it ever happening while we were actively playing the game. We stopped actively playing at the Sunset Announcement. I'm pretty sure there were tombstones up until that point right? After that, I only really had the time to piddle around on alts and stuff. It just got painful to log in knowing that anything I was doing would stop soon.

But I don't recall TS's being taken out that far in advance of the game, I thought it happened right around the sunset announcement, or perhaps when COW came out.

The TS's were removed shortly before they changed the entire network protocol for Vanguard. We didn't start getting packet collects till after the network protocol was changed.