The Death Penalty

This is where things get tricky, because Starbound has leveling mechanics without an actual level system. It makes fixing this extremely difficult, as the usual solution for this is to add level requirements to the gear, so you can't wield or wear something you're not supposed to yet. Even pixel loss on death doesn't do the trick because players may still decide that losing all their pixels is worth getting a weapon that devastates everything, since they can make those pixels back and this time keep them better. If they're already at or near rock bottom and have the fuel for an up and back trip to a planet, there's actually no penalty for this at all.

Any sort of death penalty short of permadeath may actually do little to curb this sort of thing just because the permanency of success would need to be countered with an equally permanent punishment for failure.

This is yet another reason why death penalty mechanics aren't that great, they have to match whatever the thing they're trying to solve is. I remember a developer of an MMO I once played publicly admitting the reason why they wouldn't reduce the XP penalty on death was because it was intended to irritate and frustrate players, and by reducing the penalty it would make it would throw the frustration factor out of whack with the things it was measured against. Yes, that is correct, their official reason for implementing a death penalty was to make players irritated. Thus, when some guy rages at you in all caps for accidentally causing a wipe and getting him XP debt, and kicks you from his guild, this is "working as intended." On a side note this is also why I don't play MMOs anymore, intentionally trying to irritate your players? I can't fathom what goes on in the heads of some of these developers.

That excursion aside... One potential fix for this is to make weapons require a certain "level" armor to wield, however this goes out the window if they want to make special armor show up in chests or drop off enemies. It's also a very clunky fix in and of itself. Most of the other good solutions I can come up with for this off hand take a lot of work and generally have bad trade offs.

Another solution is to... Well... Not really do anything about it. Another mistake a lot of players make (and even some developers) is thinking it's desirable to go fixing every problem no matter the cost. Sometimes it's better to let an exploit, balance issue or otherwise continue to exist than go ruining your gameplay and frustrating players in an attempt to fix it. Some of the best selling, fan favorite games out there have hilariously gamebreaking things in them that weren't fixed for years if ever. Fact is, you've never played a flawless game. No one has because it doesn't exist. One of the many tricks to making a good game is prioritizing the problems you can fix without collateral damage over the ones you can't.

What makes this one an actual problem worth looking into a solution for, though, is that it gets in the way of actual difficulty, without being attached to any important gameplay feature. Fixing people boxing enemies in is generally dumb to even attempt, due to the fact that the very cause of it is the very same thing the entire game is about, and thus most solutions to the problem are going to cause more problems in and of themselves. On the other hand, sequence breaking a very powerful item early in the game breaks the game's difficulty, progression and whatever else, all while not being directly attached to the game's biggest selling point. It's still not worth fixing it with a solution that causes gameplay problems, but it's at least something to think about.

 

I think this thread might be a bit early: in our experience, death is a given due to how the level / penetration system worked. When getting one-shot is a common occurrence, any death penalty would seem harsh enough. After we give the rebalance patch some time, opinions may change.

 

The system should be like this:

- You can bank ALL pixels on the ship, with no loss.
- When using pixels (shop, crafting), the ones you carry are used first, then the ones in your bank.
- When you die, you lose ALL pixels you carry with you, and you have to pay a fee from your bank. The fee is 20% of your bank pixels, with min and max caps that increase with sector. For example: 50 min and 10,000 max in sector alpha, 500 min and 100,000 max in sector beta, 5,000 min and 1 million max in sector gamma, and so on. (Numbers just to make an idea, they'll have to be balanced to what you can earn in those sectors).
- If you have less in the bank than the min, your pixels will go in the red!
- From the pixels you were carrying, 75% are lost permanently, 25% are dropped and will stay there in the form of a 'grave marker'. Mining that grave marker will give those dropped pixels back, and the grave marker itself so you can use it for decorations or something. Only the players in the party of the one that died can mine that marker.
- Add a 'beacon' button that works like a "town portal" that allows you to go back to the ship. Beacons can be made at the surface and at higher levels of the underground where easy and medium monsters an be found, but not at the lowest where hard monsters lurk.
- Making a beacon takes 25% of all the pixels you carry. They are not crafted items you place to use, but a markerthat is placed when you teleport back for others to see where you were when you use the beacon button.
- Beacons can't be made while in combat, and take 4 seconds to activate while holding the beacon button. Beacons also can't be used while encased in blocks. There must be an open path at least 4 blocks wide and 5 block high from your location to the surface. The path doesn't have to be a vertical line, but a 4x5 rectangle must fit at any point of the path.
- Once in the ship you can either go back to the starting point or to the beacon (or other surface beacons if a way to visit different starting points is added), either way the beacon is destroyed when leaving the ship.
- Other players can't use your own beacon.

This would mean that:
- The more time you walk around with a full purse, the more you risk losing all of it, and having to walk back there to recover a bit.
- There more you go back to the ship to 'save' your pixels, the more it'll cost you.
- Death always has a cost. You can't 'save' when you expect to die a lot. So you can't just defeat enemies by throwing your corpses at them.

 

It's disgusting. You lose pixels no matter what.