What's the best of different games' approaches to player death?

Nothing beats Dark Souls~

down system would be godawful for wow.

Legacy of Kain: Roul Reaver had the best penalty for death. If you died in the physical realm you enter the spirit realm and if you died there you simply returned to the vortex. I would like to see an online game where if you die you enter a spirit realm and have like 15-30 seconds to either absorb souls to resurrect or fight to gain back your life energy and if you fail then you get sent to a waypoint.

A/the more toned down version of Asheron’s Call’s death penalty. In that game you lost stats, items and gear, including equipped and the randomize preferred the most expensive stuff too- on top of half your current gold(pyreals) you were carrying. Which could be looted by the killer or in a good chunk of time that goes by.

Now like said a more toned down version, not really losing gear but still a portion of wealth and some temporary but more moderate debuff. Something about encitivising you to retrieve your body in a sandbox world was quite intriguing.

I don’t like WoW where you get sent to an unchosen graveyard and if you get killed from dying frequently you get stuck with a stupid/pointless wait time all the while you have to run back in a boring, do-nothing ghost mode. Graveyard resurrection penalty of being useless for 10+ minutes is rather annoying. Wait times in general are annoying. I don’t like it when loss of time is my only real punishment.

I kind of like how Rift gives you a quick revive feature allowed for encounters to factor in people may die in fights and the same for GW2 though I really don’t like fight for your life mode but combat in which dying is recoverable.

Downed state is very problematic. It turns all PvE content involving more than a single person way too easy. Developers can’t really find a way to deal with it, so they overcompensate to ridiculous levels – and then you end up with 30 players getting one shotted during the GW2 Karka events over and over again, or get downed with super accurate AoE grenades that two shot you in Borderlands 2.

The downed state is one of the characters’ most powerful abilities and all content changes due to it’s implementation, and in a bad way. It also makes 2 vs 1 PvP fights very hard to win only because one person can always res the other when they both face a single adversary, no matter how unskilled they are.

I still say oldschool Everquest or even Dark Souls is the way to go. I liked that oldschool EQ required you to work with other people in the community (necro or SK for corpse summons, cleric for rez, chanters and shamans for rebuffs, etc…), especially if you wanted to get your lost xp back. I feel that this is one of reasons I’ve made so many close friends playing EQ, but have found no lasting friendships from other games.

If that’s too hardcore these days, I think the Dark Souls method could work. You lose some xp but have a fair chance of going back to get it (although it’s certainly not easy all of the time). Since people like to be more self-reliant these days, taking gear away may not be the way to go.

I also enjoy the downed state in GW2 for what it is. Although I prefer harsher death penalties that require teamwork to recover.

who is this sexy woman? she needs to be involved in the other shows. 

I demand it!!!!!!!!!!

WoW’s debuff is proberly the worst penalty ever! – it basicly prevents you for playing for the duration of the buff. I have to agree that Swtors probe is pretty neat. EQ’s necro summon does bring back memories, but I doubt it would work in modern mmo’s – the mentality of players have just shifted too much since then due to newer game designs

Ultima Online had the best death penalty.

For leveling, SWTOR  before the F2P model where you could rez on the spot, then rez on the spot with a time delay, then back at a “graveyard”.  This reset I think every 30 min.

Raid & Dungeon, Blizzard wow Mass Rez.  Nuff said.

Maybe I should have trolled and said DayZ.

EQ is clearly the most old school, losing XP is a very serious penalty.

WoW mass rez is the most convenient. During a Raganos wipe, my mage would blink, pop invisibility, leave combat and mass rez the 24 dead guildies. (Okay maybe the Shaman reincarnated and the hunter was feigning death all along.)

GW2 – I really liked the down state, so many options on rezzing yourself.  Also, getting rezzed by someone else was one of the few times I felt like I was playing with other people and not NPCs. 

Early GW2 also had to be the most annoying.  You attempt to rez a downed player and rez a rangers dead pet instead.  Or you would see a downed player on the mini map, but its a dead pet following a ranger. 

Have to say SWTOR death penalty was really good.  The animation was the best and the increasing rez timers for repeated deaths was just about perfect.     

gotta say my favorite death mechanisms are in GW2

Olivia needs to have a “Story time with Olivia” where she reads lore from games.  She would give Wooden Potatoes a run for his money.  And those EYES!  NICE Job Lady Grace.

Aion for me, well at least its was back when i was playing.

I kinda like the methods that give you a little extra time to get that last kill in, as how many times have you died just as the enemy’s health bar was about to be depleted? So annoying… At the same time, I’m starting to notice that when you’re in hopeless scenarios, you kind of just want to press a suicide button so you can respawn at a waypoint. The corpse running method is interesting, dating back to the days of MUDs, but since WoW didn’t leave in corpse looting, which was a big issue in some MUDs, it seems kinda silly, especially as you don’t actually see your corpse there. 

Give it another month; since WoW copy everything out there, they will most likely copy GW2 downed system.

Everquest had the best system, end of story.