Suggestion to tweak consequences of death
Death's weird in SM, and people've had strong feelings about it over the years. Here's a suggestion for tweaking death and why I think it's a good idea.
Suggestion:
- Remove marks penalty on death.
- Remove experience loss on death.
- Add a temporary experience gained penalty on death.
- Scanning own INR removes the experience gain penalty.
- Scanning other player's INR grants experience receives no change.
- Remove the bandaids for death, such as no marks penalty and no experience penalty for death in certain areas like faction stations.
Benefits:
- People who are bashing can return, pick up and scan INR, and continue bashing as normal. No change to what basher is doing.
- People who are not doing activities that gain experience are not affected negatively by their deaths in a way that doesn't pertain to the activities they're currently doing. This removes a significant barrier to activities like PVP -- people who want to PVP aren't necessarily going to want to go and recover lost experience afterwards. A death in PVP becomes a setback for that activity, not a setback plus an obligation to go gain experience to continue PVPing.
- Marks loss removal also addresses a barrier to PVP and risky activities, though I consider this a lesser factor than number 2.
- No longer have to wonder why it costs a couple thousand marks to clone a person.
- The theme for mindsim integration can come through more strongly with this change if the theme for the penalty is that the new mind, body, and mindsim take time to operate at full efficiency, and finding the old INR remedies this.
- Normalizing the consequences of death across all activities is a plus.
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Comments
I like all of these points, but I especially like #2. #2 is a big deal for me. If #2 is implemented, a lot of people will gain a much more reliable punching bag in the form of a PK happy Engineer noob.