Death Penalty Changes
The first question that comes to my mind is "Why do you feel a change is needed?" Elrar, could you please elaborate on the motivation driving these changes so that we might fully grasp the situation? My likely suspects are:
- You see an increasing ammount of players citing "Death Penalties" as their reason for leaving.
- There is an issue with rants and scathing reviews driving down much-needed subscriber numbers.
- You are finding yourself short on manpower because of the volume of petitions filed regarding lost corpses.
This is all my personal speculation, of course, but i'm curious. Having said that, now I'd like to address your topic:
You will no longer leave a corpse when you die; instead you will drop an essence. You no longer leave items (Soulbound or not) on your essence.
If the motivation here is to eliminate the need to recover items lost, then this is good. I say this from the perspective that every player already has the ability to soul-bind (almost) every item. Considering that doing so costs money - you have inadvertantly put lower level players at a financial disadvantage, as the costs become trivial at higher levels.
However, by removing the need (or desire) to bind items to oneself, you generate an influx of items into the economy that would have otherwise been lost due to binding. The economic impact should be weighed. Lastly, can essences be targeted by a priest and *resurrected*?
Essences will return a large amount of experience upon retrieval.
Is this equal to or greater than the current percentage that is returned when one recovers their corpse? Changing the ammount will likely incite hatred from either side, so my suggestion is to keep it the same.
Your essence will decay after 70 hours.
Haha! A sense of real loss! Wow, my inclination is to say yes, yes, yes. But by adding this, you probably need to *increase* the ammount of XP returned by recovering corpses (above.) This would probably appease both sides.
Altars will still allow you to summon corpses from before the patch on 3/30/07 (Build 1799), however, you are unable to summon essences.
So be it! Just a question though, can essences be corpse-dragged like existing corpses?
The amount of experience lost when you die has been decreased.
This move makes sense consider the above changes.
So all in all, I like it. I own, and have played extensively, 14 different MMOs and I see nothing unfair, extreme, or unusual in this system.