Newbies and CR's

[boromir]

Greetings,

Newbies (real newbies especially) can leave corpses laying around in all the wrong places. Demon Realm, The Sea (Tempest anyone?) and who knows how many other places. And with that comes the CR which can be difficult given finding someone who will and can and does the CR. There are times when no one of sufficent size is available to help out.
Why not make a change to the code so that the newbies corpse repops in his hometown safe room? Only he/she can pick it up or touch it etc to keep jerks and twits from making thing tougher than they really need to be.
Yes, I understand this is the Final Challenge and things should be tough however newbies should get a bit of a break until they learn a bit more. Perhaps allow this to occur up to level 10 when the other protections disappear. Or level 6, a level after the Camp Tolernal access is removed.
Once past level 10, the player is on their own for CR etc.

Your considered opinions.

[Belsambar]

Would certainly stop phonecalls from coming on my phone of 'Dude, my newbie just died to something called the tempest' or 'Hey, I found the green dragon, can you get my level 3's corpse?'

I'm in favor of it. Why not, after all. Otherwise, some people may never get cr'd ever.

[Pursnip]

Im with Boromir on this one, and there is precedent for this on many other games both text and graphical, for up to a certain level if you die you reappear with all your gear intact, just a rather large loss of XP. Some games this stops at level 5, some at level 10, but as a low level character with few actual resources, exploring can be hazardous enough by itself, let alone a bad recall or quaffing a potion without knowing it's a teleport.

There are plenty of opportunities for the jerks and geeks who play online games to go out and get corpses of players who are unfortunate enough to bad recall, but the corpses of newbies should not be part of that package.

Maybe Algenara can have an "assistant" that will send a tell to a character that died and is of the appropriate level (I would say level 8 be the cap, split the difference, still a few protections but they know they are starting to get to the point of being self suffucient), and this tell says something like "Algenara informs me that you died fighting a {insert mob name here}, and has dispatched me to retrieve your corpse. Seek me out at your home city's temple, and tell me RETRIEVE CORPSE, and for a price of experience points I will return your corpse intact"

The newbie will then have until the corpse decays to get it back from this mob. Once it decays, no dice.

The other, and probably simple alternative, would be to just have toons level 8 and below leave no corpse when they die, but reappear with gear intact, just a rather large xp penalty to make up.

[Belsambar]

Problem is boosting the xp penalty. You already lose xp IF you die, so losing more, some might just say scrap the corpse, others might not know what they're doing and rack up an extreme tnl at low level ((Belsambar I was a level 9 mage with like 28k tnl. This was back in the days when if you unlocked the door for the MG Captain he'd wander around MG aggro. At one point he killed me in his office, and 5 more times as he wandered up the west side of MG before someone got me my CORRECT corpse for me as I was getting tired of being killed by an aggro mob before I even made it past him TO my stuff. 28k tnl might not be that impressive now, but as a first time player, and having only needed 9k to begin with, and having bounced between 7k and 25k for the longest time, I scrapped the character...hence why the Suicide Mage is generation II...on the other hand, at least I got better stats when I rolled the next time, Bel I had really really bad str...like, under 75kg carryable w/o str worn....but I digress))

I'm not saying there shouldn't be some sort of cost, but I'm not sure it should be done in xp. Maybe something like 'honor points', and give them the option of either paying them off in gold, or xp later. So each cr = 1 point = 1250 xp per eff level the point is paid off at = 2500 gold per eff level the point is paid off at. So you can get cr'd lots of times, but the longer you take to pay it off, the more it'll cost you.

[Pursnip]

Fair enough Bels And I agree, there are pitfalls in any event, the only one that does not have a "pitfall" would be to die at a low level and not have a corpse to retrieve, you just reappear with your gear intact, you just have some kind of a penalty or price, perhaps Algenara uses her "connections" to siphon off some of your gold for the privelege of not losing all your gear?

After thinking things over a bit more, I also think that this should stop at level 5, if the rules have not changed, that is the level you can actually start PKing (if they have changed, forgive me, Im not 100% up on all the rules just yet).

I realized that some folks would create a newbie, park him at a low level and use this to PK anyone they can, and if they die, no big deal, they just reappear with gear so no harm no foul. Think about that if you are a high level and this litle level 5 gnat is coming at you all the time just to annoy you, etc.

If memory serves I think this was final reason that newbies began losing their corpses etc at level 1 wayyyy back when 2.x first rolled out, there were some players who were doing exactly what I mentioned above, and Tynian/Madman decided to combat it to make it so that you lost it all starting at level 1 instead of level 6.

But perhaps the time has come to revisit this and come up with a more equitable solution so that those who abide by the rules do not have to pay the price for those who just wanna be jerks.

[Tynian]

I sort of like the idea of returning a newbie's corpse to inventory.

[DarkClaw]

What about the possibility of not returning the corpses to inventory, but rather creating a CR mob that will retrieve your corpse for a price? Would this cut down on the potential abuse at all? I realize your gold stays with your corpse currently, so people would either have to have money at one of the bankers or borrow it to pay for their corpse being CR'd. This might also help the economy. Maybe this is another approach to a solution. Was just a thought.

[Schwartz]

I'm in favor of newbie-friendly ideas like these. We have so few true newbies, it is in our best interest to make the learning curve manageable and assist where it makes sense, otherwise we run the chance of losing them due to lack of understanding or sheer frustration.

I'm not saying we should give away the store, or make it possible for a char to xp to level 5 within their first hour of online time - the goal isn't to make it easier, but rather, more friendly to the new player. Thanks for the idea.

I'll be including something in support of this idea in a code release in the near future.

[Belsambar]

I'm not sure anything like a gold cost for a mob doing the CR would easily help the economy. It's rather bloated on the high end, with lots of gold being easy to come by, but others have to scrape and scrounge to get 25k by the time they want to dual class.

Now, if you make the price easily attainable for a low level, then it doesn't really do much to boost the economy at all since it's a low price, and nearly anyone above a certain level can toss off 20-30k and not even really scratch their bankings. But if you make it too high, not only do they have to work for it, but it can get expensive.

Quick.

Hence why I proposed the honor points....gives it a scalable way to pay things off, with a cost to the CR, but doesn't immediately require a true newbie with no connections to figure out how to afford something that may be pricey, not just in xp loss from death, but other ways too.

Especially those that like to experiment. When I was a true newbie (my first week playing actually) I quaffed a teleport potion (at level 5) and ended up getting my butt drained dry by some vampiric mist (good times, good times).
Teleport and recall potions are nearly the only 'negative' affects that can work on a low level from potions, but they can be far more deadly than the others...such as the level 12 who ended up in 4th floor Master's (leaving a dragon scale shirt I located and went to retrieve with Noctus....the rest of that day is a story for infamy...and also the true beginning of the Suicide Mage...)

If something like that happens to a level 5, who's going to CR? Exactly why we have this discussion...

Perhaps a cap on level you can take to pay the points off. Maybe you have to pay them off before passing eff 25?

[Schwartz]

Sales training 101: if you make a pitch to someone, and they accept, STOP SELLING.

I already said I'd do something about it.

[Tamar]

I thought that corpses are already returned to a newbie's inventory.