When a player dies there should be some mechanic that discourages repeated deaths.

The most frequent argument for something like this is a player who just died can often too quickly return to the battle they were killed in and benefit from the damage inflicted before their demise.

Looking at death mechanics in other games, none of them really work well when brought to VO. XP penalties/deficits don't work because license levels don't have the same meaning as levels in other games. There are no stats to be reduced. Ships are cheap and an additional credit cost for dying will only seriously hurt new players.

Proposal:
When you die, a player receives an impairment to their ship attitude controls for an additive period of time. For the sake of argument I'll say 60 seconds. During this period you can still fly your ship, but any attempts to maneuver will be delayed.

This would make it so that a player would be at a disadvantage should they attempt to engage someone in combat, but they would still be able to fly around. If the player should die again while there is still time on the impairment, then another 60 seconds would be added onto the remaining time.

To offset the negative aspect of this, Repair Modules could be changed to reduce this time.

Why? Why not just disable the jump drive for a bit until a timer expires. Crippling a ship is unnecessary.

Because a penalty that prevents the player from playing should be avoided. With my proposal, you can still play, you just won't be of much use in combat right away.

It's already far too easy to avoid combat altogether. I think this would further discourage combat.

"When a player dies there should be some mechanic that discourages repeated deaths."

This usually involves the player's ship exploding and subsequent teleportation back to their set home station. It looks to me that you wish for a hindrance put upon the player when death occurs, (as if death wasn't enough of a penalty for their mistakes) a la "Werda Waakraft", where an arbitrary negative attribute is supposed to "slow" the player's progression temporarily, e.g. time sinks. I don't know about you but I'd rather have my time wasted on content than have it spinning down time sinks. After playing Vendetta Online for so long I would hazard that the combat would be the content to waste your time on not time sink mechanics.

"The most frequent argument for something like this is a player who just died can often too quickly return to the battle they were killed in and benefit from the damage inflicted before their demise."

You're destroying/assisting in their destruction are you not? You're surviving are you not? Your complaint is that you are having to kill them repeatedly while taking damage?

-1

we need more PvP. we do not need less PvP... rzzrrt
we need to force more people into combat, not force them to Keep away... rzzzrrt

Contrary to popular thought, Draug's suggestion would actually encourage more PVP. VO is the only combat game I know of where you and a friend can fight someone, you get killed, then jump right back into the battle to capitalize on the damage you did before you died.

Most pilots do not like endless repetitive PVP. Let's look at a few scenarios where this actually makes sense:

1. Pirate is blocking a wormhole. Trader jumps in with a combat ship, kills the pirate, and has a small period of time to get through the wormhole while the pirate recovers.

2. Pirate kills a trader, and has a small window of advantage picking up the merchandise.

3. National conflicts. This would introduce a small delay in rejoining the fight, which would let one side theoretically clear the board of opponents, creating an actual method for victory besides one team getting bored.

All Draug's suggestion does is impose a slight delay on rejoining combat as if you were homed one system away. Arguing that no limitations on death = more combat is like arguing no banking regulations are good for the economy. The only people it benefits are the ones that spend all their time sparring in B8, and they aren't the ones Electricity thinks we need to force into combat.

I'm inclined to agree with Savet's third point. That said, in the two pirate scenarios, unless the pirates are conducting a blockade, there is a fairly good chance that the trader was not homed nearby.

I'm not crazy about the OP's solution though. In the past, I've suggested, supported a method that involves homing limitations. This will make the game more confusing for new players than it already is, and put them at an even greater disadvantage when dealing with hostile players. And I'm not fond of some sort of undocking timer. Think of what that either of those solutions would do to Deneb, or hive skirmishes? It would take forever and a lot of luck to kill a Levi!

I would like to have a way to take temporary control of an area through combat. I'm just not convinced that this is the best / right solution.

The obvious solution is to make the ships not cheap. Not in the meaning of making them cost more credits, because that's not what makes things expensive in VO. If All ships except the "base" bottom level required some amount of manufacturing, that would penalize dying without limiting a player from playing the game.

So sure, you could stock up on ships that you've built in a station and rejoin a battle very quickly, but the very act of making everything but base require the time and effort to build them over simply buying them (which is meaningless in the game...everything might as well be free) would be effective in making players think twice about joining a battle again that they just died in.

Creating generic punishment for players who play and lose is pointless.

Seems like instead there is a need for other specific things like being able to repair and reload more effectively in space and having some kind of deployable temporary barricades and whatever else.

Ion storm mines might be one way to take temporary control.

You dont need to magically cripple the flight controls to achieve the outcomes you're trying to get here.

Just have a rule where you can't be homed within 2 systems of where you die with the exception of nation space.

Seems like a sensible rule to have in greyspace anyway and it solves a lot of related problems too like newbies that accidentally home in D-14.

Also encourages more structured nationalist conflict in greyspace too. You can play proper galactic force-em backs between Itani and Serco with UIT popping up at the major junctions of Edras and Latos.

It's not really that far of a stretch to apply something like this. As the game currently stands, death is completely unexplained, and aside from buying a new ship there is practically zero penalty for it. One explanation to support my proposal is that the process by which our consciousness is implanted into a new body isn't without fault and it takes a moment to acclimate oneself to the new body. Sure, the repair module part wouldn't really stack up, but sometimes you need to suspend your natural disbelief for a moment.

Sure, those who love the unending furballs will obviously be against it. On the other hand, some people would like to see a fight eventually come out with a clear winner.

You don't lose anything from this but possibly a little time. Which makes attacking things a little more strategic. If one group manages to take out the best pilot on the opposition (Nahin comes to mind as a good example) they know that he won't necessarily be rejoining the fight in the 30 seconds it takes to re-buy his old ship and fly out and jump back. They have a little bit of breathing room to try and complete their objective.

Suggestions for homing restrictions just sound like magic that leads to more confusion. Why all of a sudden has your home station been changed just because you died a few too many times in combat? That's just frustrating beyond measure. Things like this proposal are a nuisance, yes, but not onerously so.

For clarity, I am not proposing that death should have any relationship to a players home station. I am suggesting that not all stations should allow players to home at them. This limitation could be used to facilitate both styles of combat preference.

D14 in Sedina could be a homing station for those who love furballs.

On the other hand you could remove the ability to home in Edras and Ukari as well as the stations on the wormholes in Jallik and Initros. This would causes at least one additional jump to engage in or defend against a blockade. Also, Latos stations and the UIT Barracks in Verasi would facilitate the same for H2 and B11

Alternatively, if GS ever implements the fogged sectors as they have been threatening to do, those could be used strategically to accomplish the same thing.

Or, to balance jumps out, allow homing in Sedina and Odia but nowhere else in grey. That would be sweet.

Is there a reason to limit homing to certain stations in a system? Corvus stations are not very friendly to adventurous newbs.

Although.. it looks like being able to deploy a ring of ion storms around a sector gives you exactly what you want without adding the arbitrary wait timers that are the scourge of so many games.

Heck, why just say you can't home in grayspace, period? Or that you can only home at stations where you 1) have at least a specific standing and 2) have made a monetary investment. Capital stations would be exempt.

Just throwing out ideas, since nobody seems to like the suggestion of monetary penalties for dying. I'd suggested once that players pay a fee equal to 10,000 x the sum of their levels, but I can understand where issues might be. This could be offset by using incremental penalties (which was part of the initial suggestion). I'd suggested it in the first place due to 2 reasons: 1) Money is WAY too cheap in VO, and 2) Death needed some kind of penalty.

As a final thing (just as a brain dump here), why not a compromise? Those designated PvP sectors would continue to have free death (similarly if you're dueling) and penalties elsewhere?

Since there is great similarity between VO death involving actual bodies but then instantaneously given new bodies with all our previous knowledge, I would take a page out of BSG and say that a regeneration ship is required to catch your consciousness as you die.

So you die and rather than appear in your home station already you appear in a bay of what you assume is a ship. This "ship" exists in a system with a single sector and is an isolated instance that only the player who died exists in. Comms wont work (no messaging or seeing messages), navigation doesn't work as there is nothing to navigate to (This is a pocket universe). They are in an ec89 with freebie gun and battery. The player is enclosed within this "docking bay" with nothing to do but activate their jump device. Upon doing so, they appear in their homed sector. They can then dock and buy their ship and resume their battle.

It can be assumed that _everyone_ who dies finds themselves in a bay pod on this "regeneration ship", given the same freebie ship and gun and battery and put on their way but with no way to know for sure this can be implemented totally client side as an instance and not have to be "fully actualized".. Meaning no ship model needs to be built or anything. Just a small skybox that looks all techy like the inside of some crazy ship.

This gives you a semi answer to what happens when you die, how you get back to your home station and provides significant delay in re-engaging in a battle without really affecting how anything else currently works.

Heck, why just say you can't home in grayspace, period?

Because non-aligned players need to be able to home somewhere and you might as well make the rules as straightforward and even as possible. By allowing homing only in Sedina and Odia, Latos, Bractus, and Pelatus end up being no closer to any particular nation-space than homeable greyspace.

In general the goal should be for there to be conditions that are demonstrably winnable. Game mechanics where winning is inflicting various punishments on people encourages sadistic gameplay and doesn't make the game more interesting. If you have an actual endgame (or mini-endgames) then not winning (whatever that means) becomes its own punishment.

And anyway, if one goal is to be able temporarily control a sector, taxing death probably is not the most efficient way to get there.

Why not make it a prerequisite that players have to clone once they get the pilots licence. If you don't clone your licence drops back to its highest point it was at the last time the player cloned. Clone prices should be affordable but not ridiculously cheap.

I know Pointsman. Some of that was sarcasm.

Ultimately, how death is dealt with will be determined by what it actually means to pilot a ship. Are we pilots, or organic AI in effect? Even in a sci-fi universe there will be a certain degree of disbelief, especially if we're actual physical pilots in our ships. Before any of you get started, there is actually nothing about consciousness being transferred to ships in the back story. I'm pretty sure the pilots were physically in their ships.

The rationale for death having a cost/penalty of some kind is as follows:

* Money is way too cheap in VO. We really DO need something else to expense.
* Ships are far too cheap (especially given how cheap money is).
* People should be able to fight battles to a conclusion, or at the very least be able to strategically win locally in order to win a battle. With infini-lives (tm), traditional tactics for handling battles is gone. All that's left is effectively a slugging match where #s become more important than skill.
* By making death more expensive in some way, freight haulers are more likely to drop their cargo or otherwise when caught, and pirates are less likely to attack anyway if they might die. This provides haulers an environment where more of them are moving around. Let's face it - regardless of what some people want, unless VO starts offering more incentive to the non-PvP'ers, VO will always be merely a niche game.

Disfavoring:

* It is perceived that if people don't have infini-lives, combat is reduced. (not true - it just has more value, because winning has meaning other than gaining points. I am willing to debate this, as we need a structure for rewards for winning too - especially territory).
* Financial penalties are considered to be too harsh to new players.
* Control penalties are argued to cut back on combat (see Point 1).
* Timers are likely to increase rage-quitting, especially among newer players.

As an alternative to death penalties, how about a some kind of a reward system for increasing one's K/D (kill/death) ratio?

Pointsman has the right idea. Besides mines, having a ring of ion storms magically appear around any sector that has experienced a certain number of deaths/minute could be fun.