Mission fails when anyone dies

[Bluddy]

Just saw the note in the unreleased release notes saying that in many missions, if anyone dies the mission is failed, and I just wanted to say that this could cause a lot of frustration for players. Taking one weaker player on a mission could doom a mission, and this could cause unneeded angst between players.

I think a better way of handling it is to say that a mission is only failed if ALL players are killed. This creates the opposite situation, where any remaining player becomes the "last remaining hope" of the group -- a much more positive experience. I think the key is to allow the dead players the option of watching the remaining live players in action. You already have a pretty easy way to do this: just have players float around as (very transparent) ghosts. They would have the option of leaving the mission and doing their own thing in the world, or they could just keep watching the remaining players.

Maybe you could even have a rare powerup from killing some bosses that resurrects a ghost player. The only down side with this is that it would almost force players to keep watching, which some may find boring. Still, it's worth considering as an idea.

[keith.lamothe]

Not all mission types will be you-die-you-lose.  The current ones (which are all boss-tower missions) will be like that, but the other one we've started on that should be in the next release will not be.  Boss-tower missions won't be friendly to casual-bring-all-your-friends approaches, but some of others will be.

[Bluddy]

I see - you really want this mission type to be intense. Well, I still recommend some other method than having the death of one character be the end of the mission.

I'm not sure what that method should be though. Perhaps a certain number of characters needs to stay alive out of the ones that come in. For example, if only one character goes in, that character's death would mean the end of the mission. But if 5 characters go in, the death of 2 characters would end the mission.

[KDR_11k]

I think that'll cause a lot of animosity between players, nobody likes losing because of someone else's fault and this would REALLY enable griefing.

[zebramatt]

Isn't it more conventional for dead players to be unable to rejoin that mission until everyone is dead or it has been completed? And to prevent a single player carrying every mission, the enemies would scale depending on how many people originally started the mission. Something like that.

I still like the idea of there being a couple of intense missions every so often which require no-one dies, or x% of your party remains alive, etc.

[keith.lamothe]

I do sympathize with a desire to not have someone-dies-everyone-loses missions, partly for the above-raised reasons.  We'll probably be able to figure something better out.  Right now what we were most trying to avoid was giving players reasons to have a bunch of allies idle just inside the mission area so that they had as many "free tries" and/or runs-back-to-town as they wanted, where they would only get one try in single-player.

Perhaps a better option would be:
1) the boss/monster stat scaling inside the mission area keys off the total number of players that have ever been in the mission area (any chunk of it, not just the monster's chunk), so that if you have allies "waiting in the wings" that's fine but the stuff you're facing will have that much more health and you'll have to do more damage than you normally would
2) death in a mission area does not automatically cause mission failure, rather it increments the number of player deaths on that specific mission's object
3) when the number of player deaths >= the total number of players that have ever been in the mission area (the same number used for monster scaling), the mission is failed
4) picking a new character after dying in a mission area respawns you in the mission "staging area" so you don't get to go back to town and re-kit and whatnot (you can do that by abandoning the mission, going back to town, and restarting, but not while retaining mid-mission progress).  This is how we're planning on handling death for the non-death=loss missions, anyhow.
5) when a mission is failed or abandoned, the player-death-count and mission-monster-scaling numbers are reset to zero, so the next time the mission is attempted it's a clean slate

As far as griefing, that kind of behavior generally cannot be prevented in the game design itself without compromising the design.  People problems are almost always harder than technology problems.  Rather, it would be better to let the server admin specify who had the authority to start a mission, to join a mission, or abandon a mission.  Possibly letting the person starting a mission say who's allowed to join in to that specific mission too.  That last one could be used by the game to let an individual player "abandon" a mission without abandoning it for everyone: the game would just not let that player back in unless the whole mission was restarted.

[Bluddy]

I do sympathize with a desire to not have someone-dies-everyone-loses missions, partly for the above-raised reasons.  We'll probably be able to figure something better out.  Right now what we were most trying to avoid was giving players reasons to have a bunch of allies idle just inside the mission area so that they had as many "free tries" and/or runs-back-to-town as they wanted, where they would only get one try in single-player.

Avoiding runs back to town is simple -- nobody should be allowed to join a tough mission once it's started.

I realize now that you have a massive scaling problem. You could have one person or 20 people entering the same mission. There's no way monster HP/damage scaling will be enough to challenge that many people, because they can then pull off tricks like waiting by the sidelines. Strictly speaking though, having one person's death fail the mission doesn't eliminate this trick. People can still take turns facing the boss, simply making sure to end their 'turn' before they lose all their health.

I think a better method to prevent this strategy is to have player damage be copied to all players. If one player gets hit, everybody loses the same amount of HP. If enough damage is taken to kill a player, only those players with more HP, or who manage to quickly heal some of the HP, will survive.

Initially I thought only a reduced amount of damage should be copied to the non-damaged players, but this won't scale: If going in with 5 players will hit other players for 1/5 of the damage, and going in with 20 will hit everyone for 1/20th of the damage, that presents a huge incentive to go in with as many players as possible. Damage simply has to be cloned identically for all players in the boss room.

[Toll]

The thing is, it already does copy the damage to the other players; kindof. Unless it was changed (I've honestly been unable to keep up with all of the changes), enemies (both bosses and trash) attack every player in range with melee and ranged attacks.

[keith.lamothe]

The thing is, it already does copy the damage to the other players; kindof. Unless it was changed (I've honestly been unable to keep up with all of the changes), enemies (both bosses and trash) attack every player in range with melee and ranged attacks.

They will attack all players they touch with melee, and ranged attacks pierce and so can hit multiple players.

Basically, mobbing a boss with 20 players is going to result in a fairly serious (and hilarious) wipe due to vengeful ghosts unless you're very good or very lucky.

[tigersfan]

I do sympathize with a desire to not have someone-dies-everyone-loses missions, partly for the above-raised reasons.  We'll probably be able to figure something better out.  Right now what we were most trying to avoid was giving players reasons to have a bunch of allies idle just inside the mission area so that they had as many "free tries" and/or runs-back-to-town as they wanted, where they would only get one try in single-player.

Perhaps a better option would be:
1) the boss/monster stat scaling inside the mission area keys off the total number of players that have ever been in the mission area (any chunk of it, not just the monster's chunk), so that if you have allies "waiting in the wings" that's fine but the stuff you're facing will have that much more health and you'll have to do more damage than you normally would
2) death in a mission area does not automatically cause mission failure, rather it increments the number of player deaths on that specific mission's object
3) when the number of player deaths >= the total number of players that have ever been in the mission area (the same number used for monster scaling), the mission is failed
4) picking a new character after dying in a mission area respawns you in the mission "staging area" so you don't get to go back to town and re-kit and whatnot (you can do that by abandoning the mission, going back to town, and restarting, but not while retaining mid-mission progress).  This is how we're planning on handling death for the non-death=loss missions, anyhow.
5) when a mission is failed or abandoned, the player-death-count and mission-monster-scaling numbers are reset to zero, so the next time the mission is attempted it's a clean slate

FWIW, I really like this design idea.

[zebramatt]

I do sympathize with a desire to not have someone-dies-everyone-loses missions, partly for the above-raised reasons.  We'll probably be able to figure something better out.  Right now what we were most trying to avoid was giving players reasons to have a bunch of allies idle just inside the mission area so that they had as many "free tries" and/or runs-back-to-town as they wanted, where they would only get one try in single-player.

I realize now that you have a massive scaling problem. You could have one person or 20 people entering the same mission. There's no way monster HP/damage scaling will be enough to challenge that many people, because they can then pull off tricks like waiting by the sidelines.

I'm not sure that's true. If you get past a point where the monster has scaled to be able to do enough damage with every penetrating shot to one-hit-kill through even the toughest shield, it doesn't matter if you have 12 or 20 people - everyone's probably going to die!

If you were going to scale with the number of people, you could implement a hard cap to how many can attempt a mission at the same time... but then, the above works as a soft cap anyway.

[keith.lamothe]

In general with MP balance issues: theoretical projections are interesting, but we'd probably want to see at least one real (for example) mob-takedown of a boss in a way-too-easy fashion before we started changing things to make that harder   There are a variety of factors involved that may not be apparent when forming hypotheses.

[x4000]

I think that the OP has a lot of interesting points.  I partially crushed two of my fingers over the weekend and so typing longer stuff is difficult today (though I can type at all, which was not true two days ago), so I'm going to be briefer than normal with some of these threads.  I like the idea of "last remaining hope," though.

The problem with "one a hard mission is entered, no one else can enter" is that presently this would mean only one player can ever be in them.  THAT said, another use for the staging areas that we're adding is that players could collect in there, and then no more players could enter the mission once the staging area has been left.  So it's sort of an airlock model, in some respects.  Then if you die during a hard mission, the scaling doesn't go back down but you also can't get back in unless the others abandon the mission.

Something like that wouldn't be as prone to griefing, though still somewhat prone, and would give players time to strategize in advance of activities.

Well, look at that, apparently I can type a bit better than I thought.  That's a good thing.

[zebramatt]

Works for me!

[Bluddy]

Sorry about your fingers Chris.

New players definitely have to be prevented from joining in the middle of a tough mission with heavy consequences, whether they involve the mission ending with any character's death or some other difficulty condition. All it takes is one noob entering the mission and messing it up for everybody else to get really pissed off. Assuming that AVWW reaches the popularity level we're all hoping for, that's going to be a common occurrence unless people can only join missions that have very light losing conditions.