Let me preface this by saying I totally back Dentin profiting (or at the least, offsetting the expenses of hosting and maintaining the game) off of his game. I have no problems with this at all. I have no problems with players donating for cool things that provide zero or negligible advantages; they want to support the game and they should get something cool for supporting the game. Personally, I draw the line at Weightlesses. They are useful enough to be worth donating for, but they can for the most part be cloned through the Tensor's Floating Disc spell. Anything past a weightless is basically pay-to-win, and extremely lame.
Which brings me to today's topic which is Deathcards. A little history first. Deathcards were introduced during the advent gift period (December 2012). Basically, if you would have died, you're instead transported instantly back to recall. They were extremely rare and also non-transferable,as well as non-purchasable, so gameplay balance wasn't affected all that much.
Dentin then added Deathcards to the purchase list via credits. After this, several people chimed in and said that Deathcards were bad idea. Three points were brought up: That players were basically able to buy experience via the cards, as well as skill loss prevention, and being able to skirt around what should have been a mob death.
Dentin's response was swift: He proclaimed death counts to be a bad metric and removed them from finger. Going further, he also removed them from the brag command. 'Brag death' now proclaims how many deathcards you possess. You can however, view deaths on whoami. Note that Dentin didn't remove the deathcounts to enhance profiting off of deathcard sales: He has in the past threatened to remove deaths from finger.
This was not entirely unexpected: There is a market for the cards, and Dentin has been earning revenue off them. Dentin simply was not going to remove the option to purchase the cards. He claimed deathcounts were removed because of drama over deathcounts.
Any stat, by itself, is a bad metric, deathcounts included. But, when used in the conjunction with other stats, deathcounts can offer a glimpse into how efficient a player is. For instance, a level 2 player with 30 mob deaths probably has an iq well under room temperature, while 600 deaths at 1000+ fame can be explained.
We have leaderboards. Players like to see how they stack up to other players, and strive to better how they play the mud. Dentin said mob deaths are a negative score that can only increase and the only one other than exp lost that fits that category. While this is true, you can increase everything else, which will in turn make your make deaths look better comparatively. Dentin's argument is like removing strikeouts from a batters statsheet. 4 strikeouts by batter in a game is almost always horrible, but 4 strikeouts in a 400+ at-bat season would be an epic accomplishment.
I thereby offer this three-part compromise:
1) Deathcards stay purchasable.
2) Deaths being reinstated on finger/show/brag, and removed from whoami (it's spammy enough as it is)
3) Deathcards be changed to this: The player is killed, but the gods, in addition to renewing your lease on life, also prevent any skill or experience lost, but you still earn a death.
This compromise makes sense on many levels, and I hope Dentin takes this blog article into consideration.
Just to clear things up, the death count was not hidden from public view because I wanted to make money off death cards. I have previously threatened at least twice in the previous year to remove the death count for other reasons, long before death cards came into existence.
ReplyDeleteThis latest bit of stupidity involving death cards was merely the straw that broke the camel's back.
I've heard a lot of reasons why the death count is good, with players saying that they use it to make decisions about others:
- a high death count means a player sucks and doesn't know how to play
- a high death count means a player is good and is attacking really hard mobs
- a high death count means a player is careless
- a low death count means a player is good and doesn't die often
- a low death count means a player sucks and only stays in safe zones
- a low death count means a player sucks because they bought a lot of death cards
- newbies get depressed because they have a high death count
- newbies feel good because they see that other players have high death counts
Consider this for a moment. What does it mean to say that player X has a death count of 5, but player Y has a death count of 22, without any other information? Can you really draw any inferences about the two players at all, without other information?
In the world of science, when we see a statistic that has the above qualities, we call it by its proper name: useless.
Yet for some reason, people are terribly attached to it, to the extent that I periodically have to deal with noobs trying to artificially rack up their death count, to explanations about why player X is better than player Y, so the seemingly endless drama festivals that death count seems to cause every handful of months. Why might this be the case?
I think it's because the death count can mean anything you want it to. You can use it to explain pretty much any player you want, and like a horoscope, it's accurate because you can pick the interpretation you want. Think somebody sucks? Clearly, their high death count shows that they don't know what they're doing. Think somebody is awesome? Well clearly, their high death count shows that they attack the hardest mobs on the game. How great it must be to have a piece of evidence that supports any viewpoint you wish for it.
That's the final reason for the removal. I have become more convinced than ever that people are in love with the death count for no other reason than it makes an excellent foundation for argument. That's not a compelling enough reason for it to stay, because I'm the one who has to deal with the fallout.
My end goal was never to remove all interesting statistics, or remove all possible sources of drama. My end goal is merely to reduce the feedback factor that allows death count issues to become flamewars and newbie suicide festivals. I think that hiding it from public view will be sufficient for that.