One death doesn't cause aggro.

One death doesn't do much more than cause mild annoyance.

If you wish to tangeably stunt another character, the only way of doing this is to kill them multiple times, because ONE death is nothing.

DEATH SHOULD NOT BE SO LIGHT. THAT IS THE PROBLEM.

As it is, the only way to truly "kill" someone, and stop them getting back in their ship and to where you are in 5-10 minutes, is to force them to log off.

We need to discuss what penalties a player should get upon death, or it will forever be 9 players playing FairyLand to 1 playing Space Quake. ALL TEN OF THOSE PLAYERS SHOULD FEAR DEATH AND NOT TRUST THAT PEOPLE WILL NOT ATTACK.

Death needs to be FEARED.

Some suggestions:

Death = faction hit for ALL factions, -100ish
Death = access limited to specials/semispecials of the home station upon spawning until you regain trust
Death = loss of held cash (would require an implemented galactic bank in nation/faction capitals)

Advanced suggestions:

Progressive navcomputer- reveals sectors/systems on the map as you go, meaning only your and maybe UIT space would show up initially depending on the cost of the ship. Thus, you would not be able to warp as far as you would before until you "rediscover" the systems in your path back.
Say when you warp you can see a 5x5 square of sectors centred on you reveal themselves, and can only warp inside them. This would be a way to make you hold your ship more tightly or face having to remap the necessary parts of the universe.

Salvage yard- If you die, you don't lose your ship. Ships/weaponry/equipment increases exponentially in cost, and when you die, your ship suffers semi-permanent damage and is dumped in the salvage yard of your nation capital. Then depending on the ship, to repair everything to close to their former glory, you would need X of premium ferric, Y of premium carbonic, Z of premiu xithricite, etc- tying in some crafting/mining elements, making Epic weapons/ship parts infinitely more desirable, and making death a pain in the ass.

Attunement- As you fly in and use your ship, it starts to improve as you get to "know" it better. That is to say, you can squeeze a little more juice out the battery or a tad more damage from the blasters. If this increased over time by tiny amounts it would psychologically make you less inclined to take near-death risks in a seasoned ship.

Duels- should not kill. We have friendly fire off, in a consensual duel, the win should be declared when one player reaches 20% or less- after which they can no longer be damaged by their opponent until they leave the sector. This would circumvent any death penalties implemented...

Just raw ideas, feel free to pick them apart.

I definitely agree that death needs some more tangible penalties, but death penalties are a very tricky problem.

I dont think any of your current suggestions would be acceptable, as all of them are far too harsh IMO. Death is just far to common an occurence in VO, and it was meant to be.

Unfortunately at this time I dont have any significantly better suggestions to offer, just some different ones.

making money harder to get and ships more expensive, but that only creates a true death penalty for new players, as older players will still have enough money to absorb the losses without much of a change.

Creating some limits on who can home where and get good equipment, (make it so that some factions are opposed to each other and you cant have high reputation with everyone) would help a little, because then depending on WHERE the fight is taking place you might have to decide between good equipment and longer travel time or fast travel and poor equipment.

A time limit on respwaning might work if it was short enough, but in general down time in a game is a bad idea as boredom is the great enemy.

Another solution would be to give ships an unarmed, cargoless, inveunerable, invisible and untargetable escape pod with the same speeds as a bus and infinite turbo, then making them fly manually back to a station instead of being able to just.. respawn. once again however this is down time and not neccesarily a good idea, tho it would make it quite easy to take good screenshots. unfortunately it would make spying all too easy.
maybe give it a duration of 5 minutes flight time at which point you automatically end up at the nearest station you can dock in.

I think money is key. But there'll also need to be a balanced economy for that to be effective. And it may also require some type of money and inventory reset (but not faction/skill) in the future. So I'm not sure how most people would take that. But I think it would help a lot.

I personally don't believe that money could be a good death penalty. Since there is no permanent death, characters will probably tend to hoard ever increasing amounts of capital and other possessions, making death irrelevant for old characters.

If only there would be a way to make every death meaningful, dramatic, "worth dying for". Then you could impose serious real severe death penalties. But how to mimic this P&P RP feature in a virtual world?

that is the question margoth. that is the question.

[quote]characters will probably tend to hoard ever increasing amounts of capital and other possessions, making death irrelevant for old characters.[/quote]
You can make it take off a percentage of your total wealth rather than a fixed fine.

Respawn time seems like a good idea though. Especially if it's tied to how far away you are from your home station. I'd like it if "home" was something more permanent as well. Like, you have to pay to get the right to home anywhere outside your capital or any of the "barracks" stations at the borders.
It would sort of be like buying an apartment in a station. And you have to have an apartment to be able to respawn there. The apartments would be rather expensive too I'd imagine. This would also open up potential for lots of other gameplay related additions. Like maybe anything progressive, such as your ship's map (to build on Dave's idea,) has to be saved at home if you want it to remain after death.

The more obvious penalty, of course, would be some percentage loss of exp. or even a whole license level once you pass some minimum threshold.

I'm an opponent of making it a percentage of any total, be it cash or XP because this just penalizes the higher level players more than the lower level ones, and in general an XP penalty is a very bad idea.

having to pay to home somewhere seems like a good idea, once the economy is set up better so money isnt as quick to be gained.

I must say i DO like the idea of making any time to respwan penalty based on how far away your home station IS. It would work far better if combined with the idea that you cant get good standing everywhere however, because right now you can just home wherever you want and still have very good equipment with just a few hours work to max out standing.

EDIT what about a temporary penalty for dying that is cumulative and geared to make a lot of sudden deaths more penalizing than a few scattered ones, without being a severe time sink long term (eg regaining lost levels).

what if when dying you take the loss of a random combat related license level down to a minimum level of 2 for a recovery time that lasts *10 minutes. each time you die before the 10 minutes is over you loose another level and *5 minutes is added on to the recovery time.
then when that timer runs out, you get all the levels you have lost back at once.
Then you have the choice of fighting at a disadvantage for a while, or getting out of the fight short term (same thing as a victory for the other side)

*picked numbers kind of at random.. open to debate as to actual length of time.

I've given only a tiny bit of thought to this subject.

I like the recrafting ship Idea combined with the financial Hit idea.
No answers here...just a leaning.

Death does need a bigger...ah...inconvience. A replay of the events leading up to death perhaps...wastes time, entertains, and maybe could teach people something. That combined with some financial hit greater than the cost of a ship should discourage dying.

Another point...for all those who hate runners...increasing the death penalties will increase the numbers of people trying to survive encounters...by running.

Oh...New posts!...I like the Apartment Idea too now!

But shouldn't respawn time be tied INVERSLY to the distance from the Death...

That way, time used to travel back to said Battle would figure in ...while stopping someone based a hop away from returning right away to the battle.

In otherwords: One stationed across the galaxy, would respawn instantly, while one stationed a jump away would have to wait a bit.

P.S...a spell checker for the threads would be nice.

Dofus has an interesting way of handling death penalties. You don't lose any stats other than an "energy rating" which begins at 10,000 and every time you die, you lose a certain amount of energy (I'm still low level, so I suspect my death penalties are less, so I lose between 100-200 energy per death). And once your energy hits 0, you become a ghost and there are penalties, like decreased movement. You then have to be resurrected by buying energy from people who make potions and things like that.

So maybe, characters in Vendetta can only be "beamed out" of their ships a certain number of times before they suffer "genetic damage" and they lose maneuverability, speed, weapon accuracy, weapon shot speed, energy recharge, and things like that (basically, if you die too much, you're extremely handicapped). The only way they can avoid that is to do various "crafting" missions ("Bring A from station 1, and B from station 2, and I might be able to repair some of your genetic structure") to receive "intermediate therapy" that takes a few minutes to complete, and repairs your genetic structure a bit. Or something.

I don't know, XP penalties have always been OK with me, and I assumed it was so with other MMORPG players. Advanced players take a bigger hit, yes, but advanced players also tend to die a lot less. I still think this'd be the best option.

Cash, even with a working economy, is easy to get back, and we already have that, of sorts (having to buy back your ship and trimmings). Plus, taking away cash hurts poor people and newbies (who are poor by definition) more. Taking away all your cash if you die is not even to be considered, at least not until something like a bank (to leave cash at a station) is stablished. And I don't mean Services, because that system tends to be offline most of the time.

Faction hits I don't see the reason for them and they'd just be too harsh.

In Shadowbane, dying imposes on you a "death shroud" that forbids the player from using his character's powers and skills for a set time, effectively neutralizing him for that time, and thus preventing him from quickly rejoining the fight where he died. Maybe something like this? Take out the "buy ship back" option, and forbid the player from buying stuff or choosing a ready-to-fly ship for a set time, so he's out of it for a while (in addition, as always, to the distance he still has to travel to return to the fray). This "waiting time" would eventually be a frustration (not because it increases, but because if you die often you experience it often) and thus people, specially fighters, would be motivated not to die.

the problem with XP penalties is that in vendetta level is not a good indicator of how powerful and effective you are, and not a good indicator of how often you will die. high level players quite often die MORE often than low level ones in vendetta, because higher level players are more likely to venture into dangerous areas and/or take part in PvP.

The death shroud idea or the energy rating idea are both similar to what i suggested with the timed level loss, and have the advantage of taking a player more or less out of action short term but not affecting his/her long term abilities.

< and have the advantage of taking a player more or less out of action short term but not affecting his/her long term abilities.>
I've always thought of death as more of a long-term thing, but that's just me. :-D

Maybe another solution would be that you get muted out of all chat frequencies except guild and private for a set period of time as well. That we, we get to solve the lack of penalties for dying problem as well as the endemic "OMG WHY FOR J00 KILLZ M3H!!! HAX!!!!!" problem as well!

My favourite solution for a death penalty is permadeath. Hmm, other kinds of panelties... How about having "emergency transporter lag" that would add some slack/stutter to the controlling of a ship and would dissipate in a few real-life hours (logged in or not)?

the problem with treating death as long term is that it severely limits the fun of any RPG game where death is a possibility, and especially limits it where death is a probability, as is the case in vendetta.

Can someone please explain:

If you get hit to 0% your ship is destroyed, reduced to scrap metal and space dust, but your pilots body is somehow transported unharmed to your home station? So why do we need space ships anyway? why isnt cargo just transported across the universe using the same technoogy.

If it is an escape pod system, why don't we see the pod, and be able to destroy it, or capture it?

Or are we flying our ships by remote control, while safely sitting in a station back in the home system?

forgive me if this has already been explained in the backstory - I really should read it one day

its more of a game mechanic to keep downtime at a minimum sky.. its not really covered in the backstory.

odd, I've always thought of is a cloning, that you just set where you want your clone to be raised. heh.

i think the death system is fine the way it is. Some way to make it better include: having a home station in every system and respawning there when you die in that system, or having some sort of escape pod or emergency beam out animation.

However i think the biggest issue is that right now we are all flying fighter and shuttel sized ships. and loozing a fighter is a fairly common ocurrence. If players could purchase and operate larger ships (the mini frig for example) i think a lot of the problem will go away. Mini frig captains wouln't want to get killed because its a 2million+ cr ship they will have to replace. (yes many people could pay 2-3 million credits easily, but not 10 times a day for several months)

Also this would allow a logicle faction loss progression for death: nothing for a Bus, 10-20 for most ships, 100-200 for nation specific ships, 500-1000 for a capitle ship. This is fo coarse just an example but i think you get the idea. I supose there is nothing preventing the faction loss progression now, but as we would soly be in the lower 2 thirds of the scale i'd expect it to look artaficial, and unreasonable untill the top portion is in place.

How about if there simply weren't an infinite supply of ships and equipment available at each station? Combine that with a non-infinite inventory at each station and death would matter.