Deaths and such

Death is something we all can relate to. Games always must include a way to win and a way to lose. Though death isn't exactly losing, it's about as close as an MMO like World of Warcraft can get. Although World of Warcraft is obviously a fictional world, creators want to make it as realistic as possible while still realizing that it is a game and the penalty shouldn't be too harsh. Klastrup explains how WOW has shown death throughout the game and how the user experiences it.

"The visual aesthetics of death, encountered in landscaping, characters, and NPCs, serve as a constant reminder that death and life are intrinsically interwoven, and that death is part of life in World of Warcraft." In WOW, whenever a character dies, his or her corpse stays in the spot for any passerby to see. Eventually if the corpse stays long enough, the body decomposes and turns into a skeleton. This plus graveyards and environments like crypts where skeletons attack the player are constant reminders that death is a reality in the game and is inevitable.

When the gamer dies, he or she sees their character fall to the ground and a red box pops up asking if a player would like to "release their spirit" and there box three ways a player can resurrect. They can either release their spirit, become a ghost, and then run from the graveyard to their corpse and come back to life, ask the "Spirit Healer" at the graveyard to resurrect them while incurring an armor penalty and death penalty, or wait for another player to bring them back to life through a special item or ability.

Death in the game is important because it keeps the players from feeling invincible. Also, it teaches players to be better at the game. If new players didn't experience death, they would continue bad habits like trying to tank as a damage dealer class. Death teaches them that they are vulnerable and should leave tanking to a person who has specced and equipped themselves for the role of tank. "If we take the responses in the Death-Stories Survey as an indication, a majority of players seem to agree that the death penalty in World of Warcraft works well, and the fact that the designers have not found it necessary to change the death penalty in any significant way since World of Warcraft's 2004 launch seem to support this observation. It appears that the social penalty for dying at the wrong time or for causing the deaths of others makes up for what some consider a relatively soft death penalty." I agree with this statement. The corpse run isn't too bad; it doesn't take a terribly long time to revive, but it takes long enough so that death is still a penalty and players will still want to stay alive.

Do you agree that the death penalty in WOW has worked well?