Back in Vanilla, I already asked whether it would be possible to start a “Permanent Death” server, i.e. when you die, you really do die. I’ve recently been speaking with some players, and there appears to be interest. Of course this is not for the faint of heart, and the server would need a big banner warning of the perma-death, but I think it would be great – nothing beats the buzz of playing for high stakes. PVP should probably be turned off in home and contested zones to prevent ganking. Is there a policy in Blizzard regarding this topic?
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You’ll never see a server like that from Blizzard. If you want, when you die, just log out to the character screen and erase the character that just died. Now you are playing how you want.
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So then you dont want risks amd high stakes. You want risk in a tiny few spots of instanced content?
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osrs, i dont see why blizz couldn’t. it would be interesting.
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Would start out with maybe 100 players on server then quickly diminish to about 10 players when characters die. Also keep in mind that you WILL inevitably die in this game, and sometimes it is from stuff that cannot be controlled like from lag or DC’s.
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There’s really no way that a server like this would last more than a few days.
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unless there’s other modifications to the server, this won’t do well at all. What I mean is, maybe they can make the leveling process much faster, maybe like 10x the rate or something. so incase you did die it wouldn’t be that much of a kick in the butt
Every server is a permanent death server if you reroll every time you die.
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Bloodsail Buccaneers has a fairly large Hardcore community, both horde and alliance side, if you’d be interested in that type of thing.
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This game isnt designed to support such ideas. There are quests you must die to complete. There are raids where the mechanic is to kill someone, like vael burning adrenaline.
The server would be wildly unpopular.
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That wouldn’t be the only issue with trying to make this a server kind rather than a player-directed option.
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There are at least two quests that require dying to see the NPC.
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There are quests that flag a player, even in their home cities. (Really, such a server shouldn’t be called PvP at all, but even PvE servers flag players on those quests).
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Group activities such as dungeons would have a high risk of trolling - deliberately getting someone else killed.
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There are profession recipes that can’t be obtained without doing dungeons or raids, neither of which is likely to be happening much.
So, nobody will bother with those, you say? Why would Blizzard devs pour time and energy into creating a version of the game that people would be playing less than half of? A realm where no one dares step foot inside even MC because every death equals a raid with that many less people and a week or longer for that player to level another 60.
As a player-directed option, it is a great way to add some fun. (I’ve got a permadeath character to 22 so far, though I haven’t played it in a couple months. I even have other rules I enforce on myself, though not at the ironman level.)
As a system-enforced option, interest would be low from the get-go and drop quickly.
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I could see people explaining and working around such quests and mechanics but yeah the game really isn’t made for it. One wipe in a raid and your entire raid team rerolls? Ugh.
Forget pushing content, forget even leveling quickly because AOE pulls can sometimes get out of hand so you couldn’t risk it unless you were killing much lower-level stuff that doesn’t give as much XP. Forget grouping unless everyone was on the same page and just as careful as yourself. And what about people trolling by dragging mobs on other people so they die?
It’s an interesting idea but, ultimately, pretty niche.
A hardcore server which allows a certain number of deaths once you reach a milestone like the DDO Hardcore server would be fantastic. Also perhaps could allow unlimited deaths once you hit 60.
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Cool idea
There was a game, title slips my mind atm, that had this as a selectable option during player creation. These players existed alongside of everyone else. The rewards were significant and seeing someone at any advanced level was something to respect. There was some interesting coding behind accounts keeping items after death. That reduced the burden of death but it still required you to level over again.
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Wouldn’t even have group composition for ANY endgame content. Everyone is going to roll classes with “oh crap buttons” to save their skin if a death looks to be coming.
Diablo 3 has hardcore, but that game is so easy and can change difficulty mid game to suit your chararcter’s strength.
Nobody would play a game where a single raid wipe means your entire team has to spend 2-4 weeks rerolling to 60 and re-gearing just to get another attempt next month.
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There is no reason they couldn’t. There are many reasons they wouldn’t. Starting with the fact that only a very small minority of gamers in general want to play that way, and even fewer WoW players want to play like that. Remember, WoW has always been the casual MMO. You’re talking about a hardcore experience.
Now, there are ‘Ironman’ challenges that people do, but most people never do it, or if they do, then, when they die at level 5 because they accidentally pulled two mobs at once, they give up on that. The reason you hear about the people who pull it off is because it is very, very rare.
If Blizzard were going to make permadeath a thing, they would have to do massive nerfs and redesigns to make it workable for the general WoW community.
If we had this rule, the level 1-5 zones would be constantly full of players “starting over”. But that isn’t important. This is:
Are there any other MMOs that have this rule? Are there any POPULAR ones, with millions of players, that have this rule?
Blizzard can’t make customized games for small numbers of players. If it could, there would be 100 different versions of Classic WoW – one for every forum post asking for something different.
1 person could intentionally wipe an entire raid… /cackle
But hey. Black Lotus won’t be a problem to find.
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