Destruction of your city?

[SoCalDistortion]

Originally Posted by Geomancer

Some interesting ideas, but from a company standpoint I'm not sure where this would go. You say that you want utter destruction as an option - I suspect that you expect to do more destroying and less being destroyed. That's fine, but if you're one of the destroyed and you don't like restarting, that's a lost player for the company.

Actually, I consider myself an honor-gamer. I suspect that in this game I would be relatively passive until I found a suitable alliance that kinda takes on a protectorate role. I'm not the girefer type if this is what you were thinking. Like many, I would probably get squashed in a hardcore mode unless I was to rally some friends together and form a tight-knit alliance of like-minded people who know strategy.

I still would prefer Hardcore as I believe there would be a greater emphasis on alliances and communication. It can be argued that a Hardcore mode actually enhances Dawn of Fantasy's player community.

[Geomancer]

Preface: I completely agree with the idea of having a server where players can be killed off, but I absolutely feel that IF there will only be one server, then the server can't have province deaths and still be a good business move for Reverie.

I make no claims of understanding your playstyle, but I believe that you aren't a griefer. I do know that nice, reasonable people can drift into griefer mindsets when they've had a bad day, so when a game permits that kind of conduct, those kinds of people can tear apart a couple weaker provinces - I also know that griefers flock to games that allow them to grief others. If a small alliance decides they want to "go out in a blaze", they can tear apart dozens of provinces (this happened in Aegis a couple times while I was playing). I worry that we have a small community right now and that it may be harder to grow that community with province-death and reset as a common issue. I could be wrong, though.

If Reverie has the resources to support multiple servers, the obvious solution is to have province death on a small portion of those servers. I'd be interested in seeing how the populations vary. If it holds true to current WoW populations, it'll be about 30-35% in the more hardcore style, 65-70% on the no-player-death servers. I still think in a single-server approach, it's better to go with the no-player-death option, but if they opt for 2 servers, I agree that one should be player-death positive.

I think you're right about the greater alliances and communications aspect for the player-death positive approach, but again in my experience that can lead very quickly to a bully faction and victim province landscape.

Consider this anecdote - I had a friend who was pre-med in college at a school where the bottom 10% were guaranteed an F. After the first test, the people in the bottom 10% dropped the class. That meant the next group would get Fs...so they would drop the class too. After the second test, the class rank was more solid, so the next couple groups would drop. By the end of the semester, classes only had around 30-40% of their initial enrollment.

In a college setting, this be economic - they pay for the class again in the spring. For a game, it isn't - those who drop just move on to something more rewarding for them. It might guarantee that the people who are left love the game, but it won't help word-of-mouth advertisement, and it will probably hurt business significantly.

[blackfang]

I love being able to build myself up, but one i buildt myself up then i love to just charge my enemies and kill them all off and take their villages. That would be awesome but a bit too hard i guess So my opinion to this would be a little bit of both or alot of one

[Tamiel]

Personally i think that you should have a home city off in some magical place you cant attack where you can build up forces to then "migrate" to the main land founding a city but it has plenty of troops to defend and the challenge is keeping a foothold on the mainland.

But thats just my idea.

[Josh Warner]

Originally Posted by SoCalDistortion

To each his own.

Would be a nice to have a choice... hardcore vs carebear mode. Players could play both modes at the same time on different servers.

Just as you say that most people would not want to play what I mentioned, I could see people getting bored of a game that does not allow full take-over or destruction. Heck...Look at Tribal Wars. It is pretty hardcore for what it is and has a VERY large following.

Reverie- Please take a look at developing a hardcore mode for one of your servers. For me, it would make what looks to be a good game much more epic!

There are better ways to provide high risk high reward than fragmenting our player base and taking the time to rework the entire game around permanent death, without that redesign permanent death would break the rest of the game the way it is designed. It would also make any and all DLC/microtransactions far far less valuable, why spend extra money if you can die and lose it all. From a business standpoint it's a very bad idea unless we have significantly more players come to the game than we expect because the effort and money invested would not be proportional to the interest. And from a player standpoint - there wouldn't be enough interest in this mode for it to reach a critical mass of players required to keep it alive.

As I mentioned in your other thread on the subject, there are other, better ways to add high Risk high Reward elements than permanent death. I strongly suggest you think about and suggest some realistic additions if you want that high risk/reward gameplay, permanent death just isn't feasible.


A guild controlled objective, that when owned makes your members/the objective open to attack from any guild. Attacking guilds would be able to capture the objective, be it a special city, a mine, a port whatever. Or a war method, lets say War declarations cost a flat one time sum and an additional daily, weekly or monthly upkeep and it allows you to attack whoever you want in the opposing guild as well as destroy buildings/take more resources etc. There's plenty of things to add to make it attractive for a hardcore crowd without totally alienating regular players, and using a gimmick that causes the playerbase to rapidly kill itself off.

And just for the record, I've played SB, Ladder D2, Darkfall and even some oldschool perma death MUDs plus many others. I know hardcore, and I love it, the game can have plenty of things a player like me would want without such a gimmick.