Waiting NINE minutes to respawn is RIDCULOUS

It was FFXI but that was close. I don't know if I'd compare a videogame to infant mortality but I see your point.

He's talking about FFXI.

By definition, a game will have penalties and rewards for failure and success respectively.

It used to be that meeting a difficult challenge meant something. After all, when you pay to play a game, you expect there'll be some level of difficulty associated with it. In terms of MMOs, SWTOR's leveling content is ludicrously easy.

Penalties are there to make you learn. Repeated failures should result in increasingly harsher penalties, because failing repeatedly means you're not learning or willing to learn. Personally, when I beat an encounter after wiping to it multiple times, I feel a sense of accomplishment that is proportional to the challenge.

As to why I care if there's a death penalty: well, those people who are struggling with the solo content may someday ask to join my group. Obviously, if those people have no clue what they're doing solo, then they're probably not going to perform well enough to contribute to a group. The penalties are there to ensure that you know a) what those buttons at the bottom of your screen are for, b) what the numbers on your gear represent, and c) what those little boxes mean when you hit the letter K on your keyboard.

Rather than complain about the timers, people need to examine what they're doing wrong and learn from their mistakes.

maybe he is...

but the point remains, old is not the same thing as good. It's not accidental that those sort of death penalties have gone the way of the dodo. They've vanished from newer MMO's because they just don't add anything useful to the game. They're like any other time sink for the sake of a time sink.

People would argue that there is no real death penalty in this game, and you complain because of a timer? Level up more and stop dying, more importantly, stop whining.

It's a mechanism designed to force you to group.


Probably.

So you have a longer timer b/c you suck and die more often - sounds like your issue. Suck less and the timers will be less.

And I agree to a certain extent (I *hated* losing XP) but some element of risk needs to be kept in the game for it to remain rewarding.

I agree. In fact all absurdly long cool downs/casting times annoy me.

They're old hangovers from PnP games like DnD. For example like rez spells in every game nearly always take 6 seconds to cast. It's meant to represent the complexity of the spell but in a videogame it just ends up being a pointless delay (especially if it's an out of combat rez. Why make someone stand around for 6 meaningless seconds?)

And changing things like that doesn't make a game less rewarding, it just makes it less tedious. Why do so many people seem to love MMOs being tedious?

It's a good deterrent for people trying to get places that they shouldn't be trying to get to at their level.