It's not so much about making ore drop as part of choosing a difficulty setting. If that becomes a feature then so be it. It's about how it should be implemented when it does apply. In it's current state it is too aggravating and punishing, not to mention open for possible griefing and exploiting on servers. This thread is meant to spark discussion on how to address dropping loot on death when it can happen.
Oh, I dunno...maybe because I created my thread before finding this one. Plus, logically this thread would be above my thread because I posted here *after* writing mine. No need to be rude sir.
Didn't necessarily mean to come off as rude and meant more to point out that simply checking this thread, especially given the title, would have shown you that. My apologies for the rudeness, simply being blunt. Just so we're not going back and forth between two threads essentially having the same discussion, I'm simply going to respond to your other post in here, given that there's been a discussion regarding the ore drop taking place in here over the past few days. General consensus from most is that ore drop is bad, at least when it comes to softcore. The few that are for it seem rather elitist in their responses (like the classic line "learn to play"). But the solution does seem to be pretty simple. To either make it optional, or turn it off for the lowest difficulty. And then there are some who feel that the pixel loss on death is punishing enough, while others feel it isn't. But thanks to this thread (and I believe a few others?) it's become clear that key items needed for progression also end up getting dropped, which is a huge nono in game design. As I've said for my point of view on this subject, I believe it should either be optional or turned off for the lowest difficulty, and I believe the pixel loss is punishing enough.
I honestly don't have much of an opinion on having the feature tied to a particular difficulty, other than that it should be for "easy mode" only. Normal difficulty, as it stands, I think requires more player risks than simply dropping pixels. I've purposely offed myself for a speedy return to the ship. That probably shouldn't be so convenient as it currently is. My forum thread isn't regarding making dropping things on death an option, but how to implement it in a way that isn't annoying or overly frustrating. So once again, if anyone has some feedback on my topic its here: http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/the-death-penalty.85158/#post-2256363
As far as I know, you don't drop weapons on death. Mostly just raw materials, so you should be able to still have means to fight your way back to your point of death.
I've been keeping my ores and bars in the ship. i thought about keeping a chest in my inventory before making a big jump but that seems too time consuming. Most of my deaths are from fall damage, mobs are easy even cultists and the like, with block placement and a big range weapon or gun. if i fall, at most i take about 1 minute to get back to the spot, not a difficult recovery. as for now I'm happy with the death penalty.
That's just it though. If people playing on easy WANTED to play a difficulty where they drop items upon death, they would choose one of the harder difficulties. I honestly have to wonder how many people who are for the ore drop tend to play on easy difficulty. The simple solution is to set it as an optional thing, and not force implement it for those who don't wish for it. But a lot of people seem to have a hard on for forcing it on those who don't want to be dropping items. To which I have to ask why, and simply retroactively respond that for any response of easy being too easy, there are harder difficulties for YOU to go play if YOU want the challenge of having your items dropped. And once again, both threads are discussing the exact same thing. That's arguing semantics. Both are regarding ore drop. Just because your idea isn't regarding the removal doesn't mean it's not regarding the same topic.
Difficulties, and how they should deal with character death: Casual - nothing drops, 20% pixel loss Softcore - raw ores (not bars) drop, 30% pixel loss Cruel - everything drops except key quest items, armor and item slots (1-10), 40% pixel loss Hardcore - everything drops except key quest items, character permanently dead Notice how NONE of the options above lose key quest items. If options like these don't suffice, perhaps another solution is that of what's been suggested in this thread: an option from the menu. However, I don't like a kill switch for difficulty. One could simply turn it off at a difficult point, creating a "get out of current situation free" mode. Surely, this isn't how the game is meant to be played. All in all, I think options are good to help new gamers in and help hardcore gamers thrive. How the developers go about that needs to be very careful, or they will be encouraging cheaters and mods that separate ease from intent.
Only comments I'd like to make is that a cruel mode should come after hardcore, and you may be interested in my idea of the ore drop being optional only selectable upon character creation, where a checkbox for it is located near the difficulty selection. With that method, it would appease all parties involved.
Honestly, I was one of the people who found even the pixel loss to be annoying and more severe than I was looking for in an exploration game like Starbound; I was a little dumbfounded that they actually added the ore-dropping to softcore. It doesn't make the game remotely more fun (or even more challenging) to me. I don't find it exciting or interesting. I find it tedious, mostly. Why is it there? What problem was it trying to fix? I don't think there were very many people complaining that death wasn't punishing enough; if anything, most of the arguments I saw before ore-dropping was implemented were people who found the pixel tax unfun and people who thought it was about right. The ore dropping is just... unfun, at least for me. I play lots of different types of games (from permadeath roguelikes to puzzle games to whatever), but this just isn't what I'm looking for in a game like Starbound. I mean, I'm all for everyone having their own options to play however they want, but to me, dropping ore just makes the game more of an uninteresting grind, and I can't imagine ever actually wanting it to be part of the game's mechanics.
Just chimming in to respond to this point: It was said here before, but it was to fix the whole death becoming sort of a "teleport back to ship" when deep underground. Some people found that 20% of all their pixels were a small price to pay for avoiding the tiresome backtracking to surface. That is specially true early on, when you needed ores more than pixels anyway. I for one am guilty of this. So I guess that's why they added it.
Are you certain, or is that just speculation? Because I don't feel that that's a problem to be solved. If anything, I think the game needs an easy teleport-back-to-ship method. Maybe it could be disabled in some modes, but for the most part I'm not interested in having to climb back through already-cleared caves; and I do very much prefer to be able to quickly go somewhere else if I get bored or frustrated with the current area.
I absolutely and completely disagree. I don't feel that it requires a risk of the sort you're describing, nor do I feel that that risk adds anything at all to the game. Again, look at Terraria -- it has a Magic Mirror that, once you have it, allows you to instantly teleport back home at any time at almost no meaningful cost. I don't think that anyone would really argue that the magic mirror makes Terraria less exciting; all that it does is remove the boring tedium of making your way back home once you're done with a particular area. The most important risk, in an expedition, is that you will have to go back before you're done (whether because you're defeated or because you're forced to retreat.) This risk is enough to keep Terraria very difficult at times and to give it large amounts of heart-pounding action. What does it add to remove the ability to return home quickly? What does it add to reinforce the failure-state of being sent back to the beginning with "we're erasing your last few hours of grinding, now you have to grind again?" Nothing. To me, there is no additional intensity and no additional challenge from these things -- I feel that they come out of people almost fetishizing this abstract ideal of difficulty without really thinking in terms of what makes an interesting challenge or what parts of the game are fun. You're taking away pulse-pounding fights against new opponents and ominous explorations of strange new worlds, and replacing them with additional grinding and tedious, valueless time wasted traveling through already-explored areas. I mean, I know people feel differently about these things! That's why the death penalty is adjustable. But personally, I get nothing out of it but a vague sense of irritation that the game is wasting my time, and an annoyance at what I feel to be aspects of bad game design that have persisted because there's this sense that you "must" do it this way for vaguely-defined reasons. I think that when you actually look closely at it, you find that it doesn't really add anything worthwhile. (With that said, if it's just speculation, I'm inclined to say you're wrong -- I'm reasonably certain that Starbound will get something like Terraria's magic mirror eventually, because, again, the alternative is mostly tedium. People in Terraria made all the arguments you're making here about how the Magic Mirror would ruin everything and about how having an easy exit would eliminate the sense of risk and so on -- and it turned out they were all basically wrong.)
I have never played Terraria (there, I said it. Flay me...). What made me purchase Starbound wasn't the resemblance. And I think you're mistaking me for a defendant of that mechanic. I said spelunking has to have a risk, not that losing ores is the best answer. It is one answer, though. And this... magic mirror thing seems largely a money sink to me if having your face eaten by a monster achieves the same thing for free. But then who am I to criticise what people finds fun or not, yeah?
The magic mirror can't be bought, it's randomly found (and has unlimited free uses.) I like making "convenience" items like that random treasures -- not too rare, so you get them eventually, but something you have to find, so it feels cool and you appreciate having them. Terraria teleports you back to spawn when you log out anyway, so the magic mirror is purely convenience, but it still feels cool to have it. And (on softcore difficulty) when you die in Terraria, you just drop some of the money you have on-hand, which you can go to retrieve later. The key part is that money in Terraria is never essential -- you don't need it to advance, and you can't buy the best stuff. It's just (another) convenience, so you're never forced to grind back the money you lost when you died the way Starbound forces you to grind back pixels and ores. This is part of the reason why I feel that even the way pixels (and pixel loss on death) is poorly-handled in Starbound at the moment. But this is part of a larger underlying issue with advancement and the incomplete nature of the game, so it'll have to wait until advancement is more fleshed-out before I can really say anything about it beyond generally not liking how it happens to work at the moment. (Underlying this is the fact that Starbound has too many "essential" steps in a rigid linear advancement -- you need to build big expensive advancement items to fight bosses, and you pretty much need each tier of gear in order. These are why the game feels so grindy at the moment. Whereas Minecraft or Terraria are much more open -- yes, you lose things when you die, but it is less grindy because the game doesn't force you to pursue one specific path, so if you get annoyed you can just change directions and do something else. The few really important advancement items in Minecraft, like pickaxes, are easy to get. Starbound, though, gives you a laundry-list of stuff you absolutely must grind extensively and repeatedly in a specific order if you want to access most of the content.)
Well, i totaly agree - oredrop isn't good decision for a softcore difficulty. (IMHO item drop and permadeath already an overkill in exploration games) Starbound is not about grind - it is about traveling and exploration. And whel you lost all you grinded for the last couple of hours, you don't feel something like "oh, game is hard, i must do better next time", you fell like "oh dawg not this danm thing again". Cause grind bounding you don't let you explore. Itemdrop can't make game more intresting or hard (maybe, just a litle bit), it can make game only more frustrating and time-consumpting. I think Chucklefish should disable this thing in softcore. Or make it optional. Cause you know - someone like "doing things the hard way"
