UE Bonus on Death

What exactly the amount such a bonus would take would probably be very contentious but for example a character dying could receive a 40UE bonus when they died which would advance their character ahead in their progression, sometimes a considerable step forward, to salve the disadvantage they were given.

The novelty of this idea is that it could also apply to Max UE characters, who may be the ones with the greatest incentives to avoid death due to their investment and costs and sometimes much higher risk of DCD. Dying with a full set of gear to your enemies at Max UE can be totally crippling but if it came with the catch-up bonus that now you were a little bit permanently stronger or more skilled than you were before, it could make spiral situations of continuous losses have a net to catch them, and make winning continuously generate ever more capable rivals, so that stagnation at the top was never permanent.

Because characters are reined in by DCD, I believe this type of mechanic could never really create too much weirdness with builds overall, but might help make players more adventurous and more risk taking when they knew their death meant positive progression in some way.

When you die, you get a UE earning bonus for a period of time (say, 1 week). During that time, whenever you are granted 1UE, you instead get 2UE or perhaps 3UE.

This would balance out some of the shittiness of dying OOCly, by giving you so additional UE gains during a period of time after the death.

It would give nothing to max UE people, they already have all the UEs.

You wouldn't lose the bonus upon death, it would just continue on. Most likely though, it would continue from the original start point, so that people can't game the system.

I don't think DCD is common enough to be a deterrent. We see people chain vat almost deliberately already, and 40 UE is well worth whatever treatment costs they might have to cover. They'd just be taking a risk for potentially big gains.

(I realise there is permadeath but most of it seems to be self inflicted).

I would vote no on death having less meaning, kind of ruins the weight of it.

If you're running immy threads, and have cheap weapon options or a ma/brawler build… you can probably burn through a few clones very quick. Don't forget some people abuse the existence of a certain organization as well.

However it did made me think that death could actually be made more fun mechanically.

You want players to fear death, true, but not so much they avoid conflict or interaction which I think may be the case now (because players are saying it is).

These are the things I think about, as a cynic, because the most likely people to exploit mechanics aren't interested in everyone's fun. They are interested in getting what they want, and nothing else.

Would you feel the same way if someone took out a six figure loan from a player, then started drowning themselves over and over in the sewers in the middle of the night to farm UE, get where they want to be, and disappear for a couple months, leaving the loaner with no recourse for action or collection?

I'm sure we can cross that incredibly bizarre bridge when we come to it. No, I don't twist myself into knots with what someone might do that might not be withing completely expected conditions, I concern myself with what players are doing and what they are likely to do on average.

We want players to risk and die more, the intent of such a change is to harness what you are framing as a negative. Players looking for an advantage is a strong gameplay motivator if we harness it, but we choose so often to limit everyone and call those motivations bad things, and we should not be surprised players have very little motivation.

Your nightmare scenario sounds a lot better to me than what things look like now.

There are times I've had the upper hand in a situation and tried to spare a character by making a deal for instance, and they not only refuse but also proceed to have their clone immediately display the same behavior that got them killed in the first place. They might actually not only not care about death but also want it to happen if they got a UE bonus over it.

We want players to take risks, but we don't need death to become desireable on an OOC level.

There are already characters who treat death like it's just a minor inconvenience and while that can be okay when it's actually RP'd, other times it's just no selling.

My argument would be that that is essentially always going to be true in a video game and you instead need to look at what your baseline well-engaged players are doing and what benefits them and what negatively effects them.

If you make design decisions mostly around what the less engaged non-roleplayers are doing, you can easily end up more greatly effecting what the highly engaged roleplayers you want to support are doing. Basically: A small percentage of bad outcomes are good if they support good outcomes for players who are doing and acting the way you want.

Any reward or incentive or encouragement could be said to reward some flavour of non-ideal player behaviour, but the question is mainly do those incentives generate good outcomes among players who are acting in more ideal ways?

We should look to reward and incentivize the behaviour of acts we know to be good, and then manage non-ideal outcomes that appear, but for example if we have all players everywhere avoiding death to a degree that is too high (and I can't imagine anyone thinks this isn't true), then a few players embracing it is a small price to pay for the majority simply not being as avoidant.

Players will be strongly incentivized to behave more similarly to players who are more reckless than them, so the reckless players will shift the Overton window on what is effective activity and force everyone to be more active and passivity to be punished.

Long time long-term players are sure to dislike seeing aggressive upstarts being given gameplay advantages over them but that is, in my opinion, almost exactly what is needed to kick people's asses into gear.

Maybe the more you die, the more your UE cap raises. The cap remains as it is now for regular players- You can never die and in fact live a life and be a legend as all others before you, but the further you go down the line of death, the greater potential you might have to be something otherworldly.

Someone who has died a hundred times and knows that there's not any genetic material left to copy, that has gone through so many DCD treatments that they can no longer afford it, has experienced death, dying, and trauma has likely grown immensely more than someone who has not. But living on that edge, having faced so much, caressing the grim reaper, you have put yourself at incredible risk.

Now, not to say there's not a way to come back from this. Nobody wants to get griefed off the game because someone has it out for them. But this would mean saving UE and once you get over that growth limit, you're not gonna want to use any of it. You can spend the UE you gain instead of raising your potential or skills to try and counteract this 'growth into the decline' by having your character spend time doing life-affirming things with personal growth instead. Maintaining a balance. Going to therapy, both mental and physical.

Maybe the more you die, the more your UE cap raises. The cap remains as it is now for regular players- You can never die and in fact live a life and be a legend as all others before you, but the further you go down the line of death, the greater potential you might have to be something otherworldly.

Honestly I like this idea even better, it was more or less the thinking I had in mind but this is a more elegant way to approach it than giving UE outright. While it wouldn't be as concrete to an immy that their death may have allowed them to rise to new heights eventually, I actually think the idea that they'll see a silver-lining down the line is still strong.

It also fits in really well with IC theme and Eternalism which basically preaches something similar as being gospel.

It would be cool pretty if characters whose DNA was basically being held together by glue and prayer could load up on powerful hardware because their bodies had lost the ability to know what even belonged to them anymore.

Making some kind of blanket statement about how if you haven't died X amount of times at least then you're not a risk taking character makes no sense and I'd be against any kind of mechanic that enforces that thought.

Dying is fine, but it shouldn't be mandatory or expected of players to go and suicide themselves. If you can get away with something, well, you should probably be trying to get away with it alive and well.

Dying is fine, but it shouldn't be mandatory or expected of players to go and suicide themselves. If you can get away with something, well, you should probably be trying to get away with it alive and well.

Also I agree with this statement but this motivation is going to manifest in players differently, what is suicide to one maybe be normal business to another. The key is that we would ideally want the bulk of players to feel comfortable with dying sometimes, but not out of obligation to suicide but rather because the downsides didn't feel too great.

IMO we cannot reduce the dependency that the game has on players losing their gear for conflicts to have meaning and benefit and value, but we can change the calculus of loss so that young characters don't feel an outsized pressure to play topside to avoid harm, and that old characters don't feel an outsized pressure to never give an inch to their opponents to avoid the feedback loop of loss.

There are maybe exceptional roleplayers who can finesse a time-sensitive murder into a great experience but I just think out of being realistic that is never going to be the typical experience, even if players had the inclination by default they may not have the time or even the ability. Which is why when the discussion came up in OOC-Chat that death should be made better by players I thought, well why is it up to players alone to salve these wounds? Why can't the game itself make it better for them in a way that doesn't require exceptional play out of the average player?

We can always imagine what would only be possible if we just had exceptional players don't exceptional things all the time, and if only we could play better, but we really have to, in my opinion, base mechanical gameplay disincentives and incentives and mechanics around the general average experience of player ability and engagement.

So: Will the average player killing another average player produce outcomes that are on average enjoyable, or at least, not horrible? If not, there's room for improvement in my opinion because there are a lot of hard coded downsides to dying players have nothing to do with, there's no reason there couldn't be hard coded upsides.

Players are going to have to expect they will rarely ever get roleplaying in the moments right before they die, it's just not something that is going to be common, but if they prefer to just hope it will come then so bet it.