Tried searching Iron Man Challenge in the Forum search and there were 120 pages of results shown most either talking about iron ore, or the challenge that Pantheon brings just being Pantheon. So, if I missed something in my search I apologise if people have overtalked this.
So, what do yall think? Is the Iron man challenge possible in Pantheon? What rule sets do you think we shouyld follow? what class would you choose for the iron man challenge?
Do Not Die! - the most important rule of the challenge. Break this rule and your character will get moved to the Honoured Dead section.
No gear higher than White quality. Break this rule and your character is RED FLAGGED. No enchantments on your gear (DK Rune Empowerment is an exception as it is a class skill). Break this rule and your character is RED FLAGGED.NEW!!! Green+ Tabards and Shirts will now get you RED FLAGGED. Tabards and shirts are no longer ignored. We understand Worgen Hunters, Rogues and Warriors have a green Gilnean shirt auto-equipped at character creation. These are okay. DO NOT remove the shirt if you have specifically rolled this race-class or you will be flagged. No Talents allowed. Break this rule and your character is RED FLAGGED.
Spec changes are allowed. No Primary Professions allowed. Break this rule and your character is RED FLAGGED.
No Secondary Professions allowed. Break this rule and your character is Yellow Flagged. No ELIXIRS, Potions or Flasks used. We also check for Healthstones used if you are not a Warlock. Break this rule and your character is RED FLAGGED. NO EXCEPTIONS! Your Killing Blow / Total Kills percentage must be 75% or higher. Break this rule and your character is Yellow Flagged.Cannot join a party, raid or group with the intent of getting help to further yourself in the challenge.Using mage portals and warlock summons is not allowed.No dungeons, raids, arenas, or battlegrounds allowed.Joining a guild is OKAY, however, you cannot use Guild Repairs or the guild bank to assist your character in any way. Leveling via Pet Battles is not allowed.Cannot boost your character.No food buffs or other external buffs are allowed.Class abilities, racials and personal buffs (eg. Kings if you're a Paladin, healthstones for warlocks, mage portals for mages) are okay! One exception: Monk XP buff is not allowed.Here is an example from WoW.
Is it possible to do something similar in Pantheon? Likely, it will be.
There's a lot that we still don't know right now, however.
We don't know how itemization will work. We can assume that there will be statted gear, but whethere there will be un-statted versions available at different levels, no one can say yet.
We don't know how consumables such as potions or food will work. We can assume that there will be some, but in terms of what they do and how they can be used, no one knows yet.
We don't know if there will be optional aspects of character progression in terms of skills or abilities or whether you'll just get all those naturally as you level up. We can assume that acclimation will be something that you don't have to do to advance, but as far as anything else goes, no one really knows for sure yet.
So the bottom line is it's really too soon to say for sure what an "Iron Man Challenge" for Pantheon would look like. I'm pretty sure you'll be able to do one when the day comes, but it's anyone's guess as to what it would entail.
Hope that helps :)
I certainly have never seen that that long list of rules - traditionally a hardcore or permadeath challenge in a single player game or MMO - sometimes called iron man - has one basic rule. If the character dies it gets deleted. Typically with an exception for death caused by a crash, major lag or major bug. Since some lag and some bugs are ubiquitous in many games, it has to be something very significant to warrent keeping the character alive. Such as a wolf biting for 500 points of damage instead of 50 due to programming error and one-shotting the character. Yes these things happen.
Some games have given the player the option of chosing hardcore/permadeath as a ruleset. But since the game typically does *not* hold back on a character wipe because death was due to a crash it is generally accepted that relying on the player's willingness to bite the bullet and actually accept deletion is wiser than allowing the game to monitor whether a character dies.
This was discussed a year or two ago here but not extensively and perhaps not using the term iron man since that is not the most common phrase for this approach.
I am sure nothing in the game will prevent a player from doing this - I doubt if it will be available as a ruleset (that was the context of the last discussion here that I recall - should there be a permadeath server).
Permadeath/hardcore is typically not for a limited period - it starts when the character is created and ends when it dies. Period.
Nothing wrong with having whatever rules you like and I am not criticizing them - but most commonly players do not do it that way in my experience.
kreed99 said: I am willing to test this out in beta...
Awesome idea for Beta, if there are CM managers poking around, what if Beta was full of stuff like this? that is Dev controlled run. "log into X for iron man chalenge" or Log in server Y for newbie ogre PvP battle royale: can select any class but cannot be higher than level 1, or level 10 run from amberfaet to sryonaies rest.
Where alpha is the angry, tense, science and determination; Beta can be the "fun" /server stress test.
If people aren't dying often in the game, it won't be challenging enough in my opinon. In EQ, you were dying constantly as you explored, learned, and progressed. It wasn't "if" I die, it was "when" I die.
Iron man chalenges in single player games were not starting game play ideas, they were challenges to a player who had mastered every aspect of a game, knew every corner corner of the game, every trick of the trade, where to go, what to do and the most efficient way to do it. It took that knowledge to even consider playing the game under such a condition.
Many games today offer such features because the base game itself is extremely easy and fogiving, requiring no detailed knowledge of play to insure success. The iron man challenge is a means for players who would be bored to death in normal play to challenge them and it is sign of how developers focused on attending to a different expectation of play.
LoTRO had such challenges in its release. It was title you could get if you made it to level 10 or 20 without dying. It was extremely dificult at release to achieve this due to the fact that LoRTO at release was more traditional in its difficulty design. I found this encouraged poor habits (ie players would avoid any dificulty and played it extremely safe chasing the title, often throwing tantrums in chat if they died before their goal). Many would accuse the game of being too hard, unfair, etc...
What I do not want to see with this game is iron challenges to even be a thing for anyone unless they have been playing the game for years and have learned it inside out (and even then I would like it to be something not likely). If a starting player can play Pantheon and avoid dying in learning the game, then I think VR will have failed in providing a truly challenging game with proper risk/reward.
As someone with a certain amount of experience with this style of play, going back to Wizardry 1 in single player games and DAOC in MMOs I pretty well agree with everything Tanix said.
As to LOTRO they explicitly said that there were no titles for not dying after level 20 because they didn't want people to try and get to level-cap without ever grouping. Few things get you killed faster than a group, after all.
Pantheon won't be LOTRO. We don't want people discouraged from grouping at any level.
Tanix said:If people aren't dying often in the game, it won't be challenging enough in my opinon.
I beg to differ, although I fear that never having played EQ makes my points-of-view irrelevant. If dying a lot is the only path to excellence, I believe something is fundamentally wrong with the game.
If players take on content at considerably higher level than themselves, all encounters are difficult, and vice versa. However, if they engage in appropiate boss encounters, and are well-prepared for them, there should be ways to learn how the mobs behave, and still withdraw before you wipe. Not a guaranteed withdrawal, but with high enough chance that dying is not a given for a skillful group, even if you fail to kill the mobs. With a harsh death penalty, the thrills of risk versus reward would be preserved without frequent deaths. And if you learn from your first attemps you will hopefully beat the thing after adjusting your tactics in accordance with what you have learned.
To put it short: It's not a natural law that dying is the only way to learn how to beat a difficult encounter.
Jabir said:Tanix said:If people aren't dying often in the game, it won't be challenging enough in my opinon.
I beg to differ, although I fear that never having played EQ makes my points-of-view irrelevant. If dying a lot is the only path to excellence, I believe something is fundamentally wrong with the game.
If players take on content at considerably higher level than themselves, all encounters are difficult, and vice versa. However, if they engage in appropiate boss encounters, and are well-prepared for them, there should be ways to learn how the mobs behave, and still withdraw before you wipe. Not a guaranteed withdrawal, but with high enough chance that dying is not a given for a skillful group, even if you fail to kill the mobs. With a harsh death penalty, the thrills of risk versus reward would be preserved without frequent deaths. And if you learn from your first attemps you will hopefully beat the thing after adjusting your tactics in accordance with what you have learned.
To put it short: It's not a natural law that dying is the only way to learn how to beat a difficult encounter.
Yet dying is one of the key failure mechanics in play. Success is a process of learning from failure and if you never fail, you aren't learning anything, which means you are not being pushed to the limits of your ablity.
How will you withdraw before you wipe?
In EQ, mobs chase you to the zone line and if it is in a dungeon, it is highly likely that you will not be able to train from deep in a dungeon all the way back to the zone (and if you do that frequently, you will develop an unfavorable reputation.) Even if it is not in a dungeon, chances are you will be quite a ways away from a zone line leaving the option of running away extremely unproductive.
I am not saying dying is the "only" way to learn, but I don't see how running to the zone line constantly is going to be a common tactic, nor do I see it practical for the group to constantly evac every time they are about to die. In fact, if people use this as a constant tactic (ie afraid to commit out of fear for death), it will likely result with many not willing to group with that party.
The idea of such tactics did hapoen in EQ, but it most often resulted in massive wastes of time (often the success in the win is just comiitting to it and seeing it through, many times when it didn't appear possible to win). Those who feared death often did not venture far into dangerous areas, being more content to sit near zone lines to provide a more consistent result in play. Many of those types of players didn't learn much in the game to be honest and they also didn't find the powerful items or get to experience the wonder of a deep exploration in a dungeon. This also is one of the reasons I am personally not a big fan of player trade because people like this actually are able to gain those rewards without having to learn anything in play. They purchase it and spend most of the game in areas that are safe and consistent.
With great risk, often comes great reward (if this game is being designed well) and being successful in such will require many deaths to learn difficult encounters in dangerous areas.
Like I said, if a group isn't dying they either aren't taking risks, or the game isn't challenging enough.
Jabir - I agree with much of what you say but perhaps I am focussing more on the longer view when I also agree with Tanix.
Death may not be certain or even likely in any one encounter. Death may not be certain or even likely in any *ten* encounters handled skillfully and carefully.
But permadeath/hardcore/ironman isn't about doing one encounter, or ten. It is about doing them *all* since if you die in your *fiftieth* encounter you do not have a character and are back to the character creation screen.
I do not see this happening in Pantheon unless the player is extraordinarily foolish, extraordinarily willing to spend years incrementally gaining experience by doing totally trivial content - slowly - or extremely familiar with the game and either very bored or looking for a truly exceptional accomplishment.
It's interesting, I took the OP's question as something that a player enforced on themselves, not as a game mode or anything like that.
That said, I find myself somewhat in agreement with Tanix and dorotea. Character "death" is and should be part of the learning experience for players. I'll grant you that the fiction around it doesn't have to be "you died and mysteriously popped back up to life", but the basic idea is - you lost, and you have to deal with the consequences of that loss.
I don't think making the game challenging to the point where loss happens frequently to the unprepared player is a bad thing. It makes the times we win feel much more interesting - and coming back to beat that thing that defeated you previously can be a very rewarding experience.
All that said, there's no reason why escape mechanisms shouldn't exist, as long as they're not a sure thing. There were plenty of times in EQ where my group managed to pull off an evac spell just in time to avoid a wipe. There were also plenty of times where we were too slow and half the group ended up dead... or, where we all wiped.
Nephele said:All that said, there's no reason why escape mechanisms shouldn't exist, as long as they're not a sure thing. There were plenty of times in EQ where my group managed to pull off an evac spell just in time to avoid a wipe. There were also plenty of times where we were too slow and half the group ended up dead... or, where we all wiped.
Nothing wrong with escape mechanisms, but they should come at a price in the equation of risk vs reward.
Like I said with EQ, there were evacuation port spells and running to the zone line, but they were a weight in play. You could be way too far into a dungeon to run to the zone line or the zone might be of a condition where your ability to stay ahead of the mobs made such impossible. EQ also had something a lot of modern games did not have, which was numerous mobs througout the zone that had to slowly be pushed through to get to a location, so even evacuation spells would be more time consuming than that of just dying and having one of your character invis in to a safe spot where eveyrone was drug to and rezed. Add in that since it is a persistent open world dungeon, spawns are on cycles and so making your way back to your location might require your entire group fighting back there.
The point is, if players can "avoid" death without consequences, then risk is severely diminished and by the same so is reward. For what value is a reward that has no consequence in its risk?
We have indeed discussed Iron Man servers before. In short, I believe that original EQ was the first to implement this on a wide scale. It did not have that list of "rules" created by the OP. I disagree with almost everything you list. In short, the rule was "play the game. Open PvP worldwide for anyone/everyone. If you died, you re-rolled. Everything in your inventory could be taken as long as it wasn't no-trade. The server had a limited run. I do not recall if it was 30 days or 3 months. At the end of the run, the winner would be the person with the highest level. No transfers etc. upon completion. All characters whiped. I played it. It was VERY fun. I seem to recall that the winner was a Druid and that he was something like lvl 37. The only thing I did NOT like about the server were the meta-rules. All a person had to do was type /who all 30 - 50 and it would tell you everyone in that range. Then type /who all Nephretiti and it would tell you what zone that person was in. If you had tracking, you could hunt them down. Happened to me. I was an Enchanter and the moment I crossed a certain threshold a guild of folks zoned in and hunted me down and killed me. In short, large guilds will have a huge advantage. They will simply zerg the top 20 players NOT in their guild every night so that in the end, someone (and usually a very high % of the top 10) in their guild is crowned winner. Up until the point a small army invaded Toxx forrest one night, I was having a great time.
Still, I really do like the idea of having limited run servers for contests etc. But you have to reset the servers in a timely manner and never EVER allow server transfers to/from the contest servers.
Tanix said:Nothing wrong with escape mechanisms, but they should come at a price in the equation of risk vs reward.
Absolutely. Using them would be an alternative to dying, but you would still have failed and must suffer a proportional penalty. It should be severe enough that the thrill of risk was preserved, but at the same time it should be mitigated because you made it out alive.
What I wanted to challenge was the notion that "engage->die->get corpse->repeat" is the only feasible strategy if you want success in a challenging MMORPG. I've always felt it dissatisfactory that everybody stopped fighting once a wipe was inevitable. I don't advocate less risk or challenge, just more ways to end a failed encounter.
But this is a thread about Iron Man Challenge, so...
((Still, I really do like the idea of having limited run servers for contests etc. But you have to reset the servers in a timely manner and never EVER allow server transfers to/from the contest servers.))
Previous discussions that I recall about permadeath/hardcore/ironman rulesets were in the context of regular servers not time-limited ones.
I think the idea of temporary servers focusing on events and contests is a *wonderful* one. Probably not at release or even soon after release - both players and VR will have too much on their plates then and there is unlikely to be a lot of interest in taking a break for some fun with temporary characters when our "real" characters have so much to do. But after a year or two, yes.
Death results in character deletion is a superb fit for a server where "the end is near" and even characters that never die will be wiped after three or six months with no chance to transfer them.
Other possible rulesets for temporary servers include level limits (you cannot get over level 20 - so if there are level 20 dungeons or raids people will be focusing on them rather than higher level areas - there won't *be* higher level areas), contest for first players to level-cap (we may not want to encourage speed-leveling on the *real* servers but it can be a fun event here), faster leveling (someone without much time to play may still be well short of high level after a year or two - here is a chance to let such folks get to the higher level zones and see what they are like), etc. The ones I mentioned may be terrible ideas but they illustrate the wide range of things we can do just for a change of pace without any carryover to the real servers.
One thing that may enhance this is, if the temporary server has a contest, give prizes for winning. Prizes delivered to the winner on a real server of his or her choice. Nothing *useful* necessarily - it may be as little as a cosmetic hat or a bathing suit to wear on one of Terminus' resort beaches.
Jabir said:Tanix said:Nothing wrong with escape mechanisms, but they should come at a price in the equation of risk vs reward.
Absolutely. Using them would be an alternative to dying, but you would still have failed and must suffer a proportional penalty. It should be severe enough that the thrill of risk was preserved, but at the same time it should be mitigated because you made it out alive.
What I wanted to challenge was the notion that "engage->die->get corpse->repeat" is the only feasible strategy if you want success in a challenging MMORPG. I've always felt it dissatisfactory that everybody stopped fighting once a wipe was inevitable. I don't advocate less risk or challenge, just more ways to end a failed encounter.
But this is a thread about Iron Man Challenge, so...
Certainly, however my point and more specifically as it relates to this thread was that death will be a very comnon element in play (even with people trying to use escape options) and if it is not, the game likely will not be challenging the players. The common reason for people to do Iron man challenges in games is because the game itself does not provide the challenge needed to satisfy the player, so they create additional rule sets to achieve this. As I said, release EQ didn't have this problem. The idea of doing Iron Man challenges in release EQ, would be an insurmountable task (ie few considered it an approach because of the length in progression, the difficulty in content, and the accepted nature that death was something that would happen regularly in order to progress). Now later on, people did this in EQ, but by that time EQ had been changed drastically from its intial design.
Honestly, if Pantheon hits its mark, I think people will be far more likely to complain about how difficult and punishing the game is than they will coming up with rules on how to make the game harder for themselves. I think this because there are many who played release EQ who may have forgotten the difficulty in the balance of play that existed in EQ (ie the subtle natures that culiminated to create the experience) and there are many here who never experienced the original EQ, so there may be some surprises, that is.... if VR is able to capture the "spirit" of a game like EQ.