Geas

For newish players that might not know, it used to be that after you died, you got the shakes, and the severity showed you and everyone else how far away you were from total recovery.

With that said, I know a lot of people want the shakes to be brought back, because if you've died several times it's awful hard to tell when you're close to full recovery. But there's others who prefer the way it is now. So I figured we could use a poll to straighten things out, and discuss it without spamming up the ooc board in game like we usually do every few months.

Maybe we could have it on a toggle for those who want it?

We've implemented the vitality loss a couple of years ago in order to replace experience loss. Since then nothing changed, except that we had the messages for a while in between. The effect of the messages was actually quite surprising: whereas nearly no one complained about the death penalty prior to the messages (and some even complained it's not severe enough), and no one complained much after we removed the messages again, we had many heated and very lively discussions about how "terrible" the death penalty was during the time when characters were reminded of their lowered vitality.

Someone actually once informed me that he was weak and without chance because his vitality was not perfect, which resulted in him no longer having fun playing. When I looked I noticed that his character's performance was 0.625% (no kidding) lowered compared to when he was fully recovered. But he really believed it, even though his fighting performance would have suffered more by carrying an additional pound in his inventory. Without the occasional vitality message he wouldn't even have noticed that his vitality wasn't perfect yet. But in his case it frustrated the heck out of him, which contributed to him stopping playing.

So if I compare the time before and after with the time while we had those messages, observation tells me that those "shakes" were a failed experiment. And in my opinion optional messages aren't really an improvement either, because those who really want to know how close they are to recovery, are usually also those who are most frustrated when they haven't yet. And sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Amen

HAHAHAHA ! 0.625% .. THAT is funny!

And sometimes ignorance is bliss.

I will AMEN to that !

I think it has to be a shame that it is the way it is, but after being involved in the previous discussions, and seeing PCs who frankly refused to accept our assurances that they weren't being crippled by a slightly lowered vitality, I agree that it should remain the way it is. It was just too much stress for the benefit.

Or perhaps the answer is to have messages that give more information to the player?

Others would still see them shaking or trembling but only the player themselves would have any idea how much they were still struggling with the effects of a recent death.

At the moment it seems that players have an idea how much online time it takes to recover from a death (no idea if they're accurate or not) and they just watch the the online time passing in their score instead.

Just a thought. I have no strong feelings about the matter.

It would be a nice addon to vitals commands to check out how weak are you, people notice the effect in stats command after all. It would be something like, Your vitality is perfect.
Your vitality is still a bit weak.
etc etc

Yandros.

Don't know what it could be but I for one would like to see a little personal information regarding recovery.

Im going to say that if it is brought back in some way it should be private as this would give an advantage to an enemy. So unless that enemy has be stalking you they shouldent know youve died unless you tell people and it spreads by word of mouth.

I went and died again recently, foolishly trudging down the path to Giat. Ho ho, but aren't hill giants unfriendly! Having JUST gotten my first stat raise, losing it to this death was a real pain in the butt.

I would definitely like to have some idea of how well (even if) I'm recovering from resurrection. Whether other people can see it or not, I don't really care. Maybe every time I shudder in rememberance of Death's clammy touch, everyone around could have a chance to notice, based on their awareness skill.