Maybe, but now that you've accepted a compromise, we're merely discussing where.
Xenich wrote: ↑
March 7th, 2026, 13:32
Rallos Zek didn't do very well for very long because eventually people got tired of never being able to progress very far. Before the server finally went down, most of them had transferred to Storm hammer. The guys I knew loved it, but if you wanted to play a traditional RPG focus of content obstacles and progression, it wasn't really practical they said.
I disagree. I think it's a design issue. If you want to play EVERQUEST under those conditions, then yes, the risk is too high, the reward too low. You are simply rolling the dice too many times with too high of odds of dying, resulting in a mean time-to-live that's too short to be considered a good effort.
Xenich wrote: ↑
March 7th, 2026, 13:32
Perm death is an interesting concept and certainly does provide "risk" and "danger", but I think it is one of those concepts where the gameplay centers around it entirely which is why rogue likes are very specific in play design. It is about avoiding death entirely, while games like EQ were about limiting death (you are going to die no matter what) to be able to progress and sometimes there were "sacrifices" in the group in order to "win" the encounter. I just don't think that concept works well in long term progression games.
"Roguelikes" have figured out several key points, and I think that this can be blended with other points.
1. The modern Roguelike often includes some sort of metaprogression: You are expected to hit a gameover, usually death (although winning ultimately has the exact same outcome - the game is over and you lose everything). But you're often also expected to gain something: Unlocks and meta-currency to accelerate or alter future runs.
2. Runs are expected to be short: Win or lose, the run ends within a few hours, tops, and often less. This is obviously at odds with "long term progression". To preserve longer-term investment into a single "run", the lethality should be significantly lowered. While defeat or failure may remain common (one side generally wins an encounter, after all), outright deadly, game-ending outcomes should be less common: Opponents rout from the field, soldiers are captured and exchanged or ransomed, pilots eject, sailors abandon ship. These outcomes should occur for NPCs as well: Fights against NPCs generally also set the tone for PvP encounters. This is why most games have **** PvP, because they're ultimately shaped by PvE combat, except players are not structured the way NPCs are (the typical NPC is a dumb block of hitpoints that deals little damage relative to HP, while players are generally the opposite, making player-level damage almost unsurvivable when applied directly to player-scale hitpoints, so the experience of engaging a player is VERY different).
3. Targeted griefing by other players is basically nonexistent. Either they don't exist (by far the most common, so not in any way an MMO), or your opportunities and avenues for even encountering them at all is relatively restricted (One old Roguelike MUD in which it was possible to encounter other players, but impossible to identify them as they were anonymous and the combat took place exactly the same as if you were fighting an NPC, with no option to communicate).
