Don't Suffer Together (Pooled Health Drain/Automatic Resurrection Discussion)

[Andrewski]

Thanks for the thoughts! Can you explain to me what you mean by this part here? 

 

I'm willing to go out on a limb and suggest your parent poster was rephrasing the OP's statement:

 

"If one person dies a lot, everyone dies and the whole world resets and any exploration progress or base building that got done is gone with it, and everyone wakes up to a fresh new world."

 

And I agree that's troubling, although my major concern is not incompetence but griefing, which seems poised to be a real issue in DST as it stands. Right now, it seems as though Klei is leaning toward "griefers gonna grief", "I guess mods?", and "closed servers!" as the available options, but to me none of them are satisfying.

 

Look at Minecraft--the closest popular analogue for multiplayer Don't Starve I can think of. Without anti-griefing mods put together by quasi-professional modding teams, multiplayer is essentially unusable to most players except with a closed group of friends. A lot of Minecraft's anti-griefing mechanisms are save-restore tools, as well, which would seem against the Don't Starve spirit, so modding teams would have to work even harder to compensate. Don't Starve Together may simply not be popular enough as to gather a community willing to put the effort into building and maintaining the toolset you'd need to effectively combat griefing. So I think ignoring the issue or counting on mod support is wishful thinking.

 

The "closed group of friends" option is out there, but you'd be automatically excluding many players from the experience. I'm an adult whose friends have other interests, mismatched schedules, and often limited spare time. Frankly, when we can get together I'd rather BBQ, crack open a few beers, and maybe get some nickel-dime poker going. It may just be that DST isn't for players like me, though, and I can accept that, but if it's the case don't expect me to buy into multiplayer games from Klei in the future.

 

There is a small subset of players who prefer the "wild-west" type approach, but the relative popularity of Minecraft's "anarchy" servers to servers with grief-protection should indicate that the ratio is very wide. I would expect it to be even moreso in DST, since DS is such an uncompromising game with limited room for error.

 

Just my thoughts. This mechanic seems a good example of the overall issue of griefing, so do forgive me if I've soapboxed a little instead of focusing on the specific issue.

[Bigfoot]

Hi @Andrewski -- specifically, I was quoting the parent post in that the ghost mechanic would be the best of both worlds, and still result in consequence. That is:

 

 

Ghosts and Telltale Hearts seemed like a great alternative to this. You absolutely can still die, and the responsibility is on you to find a revival item ASAP. Your friends can tell you where touchstones are or offer you their own revival items, but ultimately, the responsibility rests with you to prepare for the eventuality of your death. If you take too long to revive, then you alone suffer the consequences of your mistake. And if you didn't learn from your mistakes and die once too often? Game over for us all.

 

But to answer your comments more directly: yes, I agree that there are many different play styles! We will definitely be implementing more ways to play as we add to the game, and as per usual, we're focusing on one thing at a time. Right now, the thrust of it is: if you want to play the uncompromising survival game, together with your friends, the ghost mechanic gives you little incentive to actually work together, or even survive for that matter. Dying just results in reviving, so why prepare for winter? If there are permanent repercussions to dying, how does that not eventually result in permadeath for players?

 

I also believe free form play is something that is very important to DST, and something we're spending a lot of time thinking about. 

 

[MizYin]

I personally had always assumed that if a ghost was unable to revive, that was it? As in, goodbye Mr WasAGhost from the server? If I'm playing D&D with my husband, my best friend, and his friends, and my husband wanders too far from the group, dies, and nobody can revive quick enough...he's dead. Like, that's it, he could roll a new character, but that one is dead. That's a really bare-bones example, granted, and you can always have house rules where the DM/GM running the game makes an exception if it was PARTICULARLY cheap, but generally when you die, that's it, that character is gone, reroll time. The big issue with that in Don't Starve is that you could, you know, just pick the same character again. What if when you died, and were unable to revive as a ghost, that character, for YOU, was gone as an option to "reroll" into? Like, until the server admin wiped death records, if you died as Wilson, Wilson is DEAD to you, go play as Wickerbottom or something?

 

I don't know, this is why none of the games I've worked on are multiplayer, too many little bits like this to worry about 

 

edit: specifically, I'd have an awful lot of reason to try to stay alive as a favorite character, I don't want to be stuck with just Wendy as an option eventually or something, almost everyone has a LEAST favorite character too...being forced into using them, or being forced to quit the server until the next time the admins reset it would be a huge pain and definitely something I'd fight to avoid

[rezecib]

I want to say first, thanks for chiming in on and reading this discussion! It's interactions like these that make me enjoy participating in Don't Starve's development more than any other game I've stuck with

 

The current core issue with ghosts is: what happens when the ghost expires? Do you simply revive? If so, then what's the downside to just waiting the ghost stage out? If you can't revive, then it's basically a permadeath mechanic with some softness to it.

 

Wait, when ghosts were in you just revived when the ghost timed out? That seems like the core problem, right there. When a ghost times out, the character should die permanently. A permadeath mechanic with some softness to it is exactly the way it is in the core game; through great effort you can set up temporary backups should you die, but it's ultimately permadeath with some softness. If we want Together to keep the same stance, then ghost -> permadeath seems like the way to go.

 

Edit: I realized I didn't specifically address what would happen if the player disconnected and reconnected after "permadeath". I think they should probably be locked into spectator mode until a new world is started. If you allow players to reroll as another character, then that destroys the point of permadeath.

 

But to answer your comments more directly: yes, I agree that there are many different play styles! We will definitely be implementing more ways to play as we add to the game, and as per usual, we're focusing on one thing at a time. Right now, the thrust of it is: if you want to play the uncompromising survival game, together with your friends, the ghost mechanic gives you little incentive to actually work together, or even survive for that matter. Dying just results in reviving, so why prepare for winter? If there are permanent repercussions to dying, how does that not eventually result in permadeath for players?

 

I also believe free form play is something that is very important to DST, and something we're spending a lot of time thinking about. 

 

I think that ghosts actually do set up for more free-form play and better incentivize cooperative play than the max health reduction or permadeath mechanics do. I can easily see those other two mechanics resulting in similar emotional landscapes as games like League of Legends or Dota have when a team isn't doing so well. Ghosts, on the other hand, allow for the players to choose for themselves whether the dying player is a friend of their or not:

 

If they're a friend, then they absolutely want to revive the ghost, because they don't want to lose their teammates; that's the whole crux of why unmitigated permadeath wasn't so desirable for Together, it sucks to have a friend die because if you want to keep playing with them you basically have to start over again. So if you're on their side, you'll want to help them, to avoid that, and it looked like there were many tools at your disposal to do so.

 

If they're not a friend, then you don't care. Their life was in their own hands, maybe they were griefing you, and you'll be glad to see them gone. This seems appropriate.

 

A final point about the ghosts is that they open up many more opportunities for refinement. Let's say you want to further soften the permadeath aspect, without making revival too easy. You could add an item or structure that can be constructed to pull the ghost after its life is half-spent (a ghostcatcher!), which would let you not have to worry so much about not being there to help a friend who's far away in the world collecting resources. One way this might work is that you make the structure, then players toggle it for themselves (maybe they need to prick their finger on it or something), causing a -max health penalty like the meat effigy. Then, if they die, when their ghost is halfway to expiring, it teleports to the ghostcatcher. This way you can make sure they have resurrection materials in an area you know they'll be able to get to, somewhat approximating the way touchstones and meat effigies work in the base game.

 

Another adjustment to the ghost mechanic I suggested in my earlier post was to make ghosts permanent (until revived), but for each ghost the maximum health of players is penalized (by 1/number of players). This helps bring more coop incentives while also hardening the ease of revival in chaotic situations a bit (by making it harder for remaining players to survive while others are dead).

 

I'm sure there are many other ways it could be tweaked to have all sorts of different effects. The ghost mechanic seems very flexible and promising to me!

[Quady14]

What if when you died, and were unable to revive as a ghost, that character, for YOU, was gone as an option to "reroll" into? Like, until the server admin wiped death records, if you died as Wilson, Wilson is DEAD to you, go play as Wickerbottom or something?

 

edit: specifically, I'd have an awful lot of reason to try to stay alive as a favorite character, I don't want to be stuck with just Wendy as an option eventually or something, almost everyone has a LEAST favorite character too...being forced into using them, or being forced to quit the server until the next time the admins reset it would be a huge pain and definitely something I'd fight to avoid

 

This is gonna be an awful, dumb comparison but it sprang to my mind with your idea of each character you experience permadeath with in multiplayer being straight-up DEAD to you on that server for a certain period of time.

 

The idea of losing access to a character like that is a little reminiscent of Yoshi's Story on the N64. It was to a much less drastic extent there, and that's probably one of the reasons I feel it worked well for that game, but may not work so well for DST, because in Yoshi's Story, the differences in your playable characters, if any at all, were very subtle, maybe what food a character liked best, otherwise it was really just picking your favorite color Yoshi. When that Yoshi died, it was taken away from you and you had to select another one, the fallen Yoshi would stay gone until you got a 1-up to rescue it. Still, every "life" felt a lot more genuine because each specific Yoshi would be taken away, whiddling down your numbers by individuals. Every Yoshi was a life, and once you were out of lives it was game over.

 

That could be neat for DST, but the reason I feel cautious about such a mechanic in this case is because every character plays so very differently, if you lose, say, Wigfrid, you're losing a very specialized sort of playstyle, offering its own challenges and benefits for playing that character. In one sense, like I said before, the death matters more and has gravity for you as the player because once they're gone, they are gone, at least for a period of time, and this is pretty neat because it does, albeit in a much different way from the base game, add impact to your death while still retaining the ghost mechanic in its full form. It could also urge players to step outside their comfort zones and get better with every character. I know the more I learned about Wendy she quickly became a very enjoyable playstyle despite being a much different character than Woodie or WX-78. They're all solid in their own ways, once you spend some time with them.

 

But if you died with every single character and couldn't refresh for a while, who would you play as then? Maybe you could unlock Wilton, where you can die just from another player's punch, but it at least lets you keep running around in the server in the very rare case you run out of characters to play before they're resurrected for you personally. It's an interesting possibility, nonetheless, maybe a good basis for a future server mod option.

 

 

Moving on though, I just want to restate my position on the discussion at large here: I believe that there could be an even balance struck where we can make all parties happy by implementing both the health drain and ghost form together in some capacity. There's certainly no reason a compromise implementing positives from both can't be reached, the revived severity of death via pooled health drain alongside the ability to continue on as a ghost, haunting other players and adding your own unique impact to the world around you, especially if it were developed further down the line and allowed the possession of small creatures, even though that's just wishful thinking on my part.

 

There can still be some danger of losing your established world should too many players die at once, (say the Dragonfly chars a party of 4-6 players to ashes at once with his AoE slam) but players can recover their max health by consuming their own Telltale Hearts, and if you do run out of max health, only then, after a couple convenient quick revives at the cost of a portion of the global health pool will you become a ghost and have to resort to haunting about until you find something to resurrect with.

 

In this way you may have to choose between reviving your friend who has run out of his own health pool and has to roam as a ghost until he gets it back, or recovering your own health so you yourself don't end up like him and potentially end the server.

 

Even in this form, if a group of griefers were to commit some elaborate group suicide that could also ruin a server's world, but then we're getting into some wacky permutations of a general exploit that likely won't grow to be problematic on that scale. I don't see that many griefers gathering together at once to be nearly as likely as just one single griefer trying to pester the rest of a server's community.

[Quady14]

(Edit: Sorry for double post!)

Edit: I realized I didn't specifically address what would happen if the player disconnected and reconnected after "permadeath". I think they should probably be locked into spectator mode until a new world is started. If you allow players to reroll as another character, then that destroys the point of permadeath.

 

First off, everything about your "Ghostcatcher" idea in the latter part of your post is fantastic and I would totally love to see something along those lines implemented.

 

The other thing I wanted to mention is about the quoted section above, the only issue with what you say here is regarding being locked into a spectator mode, I do agree that we don't want players to be able to reconnect all willy-nilly and get all of their stuff back, but there should also be a good awareness that Don't Starve, being the deliberate, slow-progression sort of game that it is, does not lend well to such a long period of down time.

 

Part of the reason ghost form was put to the side in the first place is because it took players too far out of the spectrum in terms of what kind of interactivity they could have with the world. Haunting, as cool of a mechanic as it is, does not at all lend to the normal progression of the game, gathering materials, preparing for the harsh seasons, building a base, etc. Being a time where you should be searching for a source of revival this is necessary, but not altogether fun for the player experiencing it, especially if they go 15-20 minutes without finding anyone or anything to revive them.

 

I say at no point should we settle for forcing other players to spectate until the world ends and is regenerated, because at that rate you would have players waiting hours because a few veterans of the game have a good setup going and they aren't going to give it up just so some other strangers can get back in on the action. Not a great thought, but I think that's a realistic interpretation of how locking players out of the session would go. That said, going back to the "Ghostcatcher" idea you had, I think a lot of the issues here could be resolved quite well by a lot of what you discussed there.

[rezecib]

I say at no point should we settle for forcing other players to spectate until the world ends and is regenerated, because at that rate you would have players waiting hours because a few veterans of the game have a good setup going and they aren't going to give it up just so some other strangers can get back in on the action. Not a great thought, but I think that's a realistic interpretation of how locking players out of the session would go. That said, going back to the "Ghostcatcher" idea you had, I think a lot of the issues here could be resolved quite well by a lot of what you discussed there.

 

As it see it, we have a few design priorities:

 

1) We want to have death be an impactful mechanic. If you can just respawn willy-nilly then it ruins a core part of the Don't Starve experience.

2) We want to reduce desynchronization between players. The main cause of desync would be if one player dies and is permanently out, so if the other players want to resync, they have to restart the world.

3) We want to reduce the potential for griefing, either through having a system that's resistant to it, or having effective safeguards against it. This could also be expressed as we want to avoid mechanics that disincentivize playing together, and have mechanics that promote cooperation.

4) We want players to be able to decide how to interact with each other, or choose their multiplayer playstyle.

 

It's pretty obvious that these design priorities are at odds with each other. To have (1) be met in the most obvious way (permadeath as in the core game), (2) is violated. If we go all the way on (2) and allow unlimited respawning, then (1) is violated. If we try to meet the first two (like with the current max health penalty system, as it has a limited number of respawns and enforced restart after those are consumed), then we violate (3)  and (4) pretty heavily. I'm going to have to explain my thoughts on that one in a little more detail, though, so I'll make a new paragraph.

 

With the max health penalty regarding (3), on the surface it appears to promote cooperation, because you really care whether other people are dying or not. But if you look a little deeper, it really just penalizes playing together. If someone plays with you and dies a lot, you're going to want to play with them less, because they're ruining the experience for you, intentional or not. The mechanic stimulates all sorts of negative interactions when positive interactions aren't enough to "solve" the problem. Regarding (4), it really limits choice. You have to care about other players regardless of whether they're really there to help you or not, and instead of it becoming a choice about how to play, it becomes a choice of whether or not to play with people.

 

So back to the design priorities, what we need is some sort of middle ground if we want to at least partly fulfill each of them. I think ghosts -> permadeath make a nice compromise between (1) and (2), and by nature of their mechanics are pretty agnostic to (3) -- griefing is not enabled, but isn't tamped down by them. (4) I think is met pretty well, since it doesn't force you to cooperate or not. You can choose to cooperate if you think the person will cooperate with you, but you can leave them to die if they've been backstabbing you. Mechanics like the Ghostcatcher (glad you liked it, btw ) can help tweak exactly where the middle ground falls between (1) and (2) by giving the player more control over each others' permanent deaths, so they can actively cooperate to reduce desync events.

 

So I guess this was a really long way of saying I disagree with you about permadeath, because we have to keep some level of permadeath (the spectator mode idea I threw in because it lets them at least be on the server and have some level of shared experience; the idea is that if the other players want to resync at that point they'll start a new world). But that being said, I think there's way more room for other ideas like the Ghostcatcher that can help give players more collective control over desynchronization. Hmm... and I just thought of another one!

 

Perhaps better way to handle the permadeath than forcing you into spectator mode would be to have you spawn in a new world on the same server. If the other players go through the teleportato, then they join your new world. This way the permadeath has a severe penalty-- you lose all the progress and exploration on that world-- but you can still jump back into playing and your allies can meet up with you, with a bit of work. If you permadie again before they get there, then their teleportato brings them to the next world you go to (that is, it's as if any world with only one player who dies is just reset from the start). In case I need to explain this a little better (and work out some other ambiguities), I'll put an example in a spoiler:

 

Transition rules:

1) Death takes you to a new world.

2) Using the teleportato gives you the choice of a new world or any of the occupied worlds that were created after the current one.

 

Players 1, 2, and 3 are in World A

Player 2 dies and nobody is there to save their ghost. They go to World B.

 

Players 1 and 3 are in World A, Player 2 is in World B

Player 3 dies and nobody is there to save their ghost, either. They go to World C.

 

Player 1 is in World A, Player 2 in B, Player 3 in C

Player 1 decides to teleportato out to join some of the friends. They can choose between World B and C, since both are children of World A, or a new world. They choose C. (maybe there could be a nice interface that shows the paths players took between worlds? only showing worlds that are occupied, though)

 

Players 1 and 3 are in World C. Player 2 is in World B

If Players 1 or 3 used the teleportato, they'd only be able to go to a new world, since World B was created before World C, but Player 2 could use the teleportato to travel to World C or a new world, since it was created later.

Player 2 dies again. They go to World D.

 

Players 1 and 3 are in World C. Player 2 is in World D

Players 1 and 3 use the teleportato to join Player 2 in World D.

 

Players 1, 2, and 3 are in World D.

 

Pros/cons vs permadeath spectator mode:

• Never forces a player into an inactive state. They can always jump into a new world.
• It's complicated. It will probably be hard for players to figure out unless the UI for it is really good, but this goes a bit against Don't Starve's minimalist UI.
• It can put way more load on the computer hosting the game. Whoever's hosting could potentially be simulating as many worlds as there are players. Seeing as they weren't sure if large numbers of players could be supported in general, this could be a major issue.

[MizYin]

I'm not going to quote everyone who replied after me but I will say that you guys all have some amazing freaking ideas, I think as long as we all think long and hard about it and give the best feedback we can, Klei can put something together that probably plays a little bit on all of it, in a way

[Quady14]

1) We want to have death be an impactful mechanic. If you can just respawn willy-nilly then it ruins a core part of the Don't Starve experience.

2) We want to reduce desynchronization between players. The main cause of desync would be if one player dies and is permanently out, so if the other players want to resync, they have to restart the world.

3) We want to reduce the potential for griefing, either through having a system that's resistant to it, or having effective safeguards against it. This could also be expressed as we want to avoid mechanics that disincentivize playing together, and have mechanics that promote cooperation.

4) We want players to be able to decide how to interact with each other, or choose their multiplayer playstyle.

 

You're really on the ball tonight! This lays out the primary considerations more or less perfectly. It's a tough balance and even with just these four aspects it becomes a very complex issue to deal with, but I think this discussion is getting guided in all the right directions to finding a suitable solution, I know I'm too scatterbrained to do so on my own, so it's great that we've got a lot of good heads coming together to consider this topic, including devs!

 

The layered world idea is interesting, but it does beg the question, would it become too far spread apart to be feasible for a single server to run? Even running one world seems to make the game chug for longer sessions in single-player, if you tried to keep 3+ worlds running simultaneously on one server, wouldn't it get bogged down very quickly? Plus, is a player going into DST going to want to keep going if they die and move to World B while most of the other players end up spending hours surviving together in World A? Like I said before it's such a slow game, splitting players apart across whole different worlds would pretty significantly go against the point you laid out in (2) where we want to minimize desynchronization between players. Still with everything else to consider it's a hellishly delicate balancing act.

 

I guess if we're thinking segmented worlds where a loading screen separates players from each other it could work, but I don't know multiplayer online framework in the slightest so I don't know if that's really within reach for Don't Starve Together's expected capabilities or not. The same issue is important to consider for things like the Caves, Ruins and especially Adventure Mode. Can these all be run seamlessly alongside one another, or will people need to queue into them so that they can be loaded universally (or specifically for the players who wish to enter them)?

[rezecib]

The layered world idea is interesting, but it does beg the question, would it become too far spread apart to be feasible for a single server to run? Even running one world seems to make the game chug for longer sessions in single-player, if you tried to keep 3+ worlds running simultaneously on one server, wouldn't it get bogged down very quickly? Plus, is a player going into DST going to want to keep going if they die and move to World B while most of the other players end up spending hours surviving together in World A? Like I said before it's such a slow game, splitting players apart across whole different worlds would pretty significantly go against the point you laid out in (2) where we want to minimize desynchronization between players. Still with everything else to consider it's a hellishly delicate balancing act.

 

I guess if we're thinking segmented worlds where a loading screen separates players from each other it could work, but I don't know multiplayer online framework in the slightest so I don't know if that's really within reach for Don't Starve Together's expected capabilities or not. The same issue is important to consider for things like the Caves, Ruins and especially Adventure Mode. Can these all be run seamlessly alongside one another, or will people need to queue into them so that they can be loaded universally (or specifically for the players who wish to enter them)?

 

The loading screens wouldn't really do much, because when it comes down to it the server is still running all the worlds simultaneously; the rest of the computers connected are just receiving information from the server about whatever world they're in.

 

But yeah, I said in my nested spoiler that I thought layered worlds could have very serious performance issues. But maybe not, I don't know. If it is, one way you could kind of solve it would be to not actually run worlds simultaneously, but just have all the permadead players respawn in the new world when the teleportato is used. That would be simpler to implement, and run better, but comes at the cost of still having a period where they're stuck in spectator mode (however long it takes the other players to assemble The Things).

 

The idea of having layered worlds was sort of going to middle ground on the desyc issue by allowing the players to resync without having to totally restart their game. They keep a whole inventory of stuff, and prebuilt structures, so whereas before with permadeath and no layered worlds, their only option to resynchronize was to restart the game, now they can either restart the game or they can take what they can carry and meet up with the missing player in one of the downstream worlds.

[chromiumboy]

I'd like to throw in my support of the reintroduction of the ghost mechanics and the 'soft' permadeath. Don't Strave without the threat of permadeath just isn't Don't Starve! However, the ghost mechanic gives you a reasonably generous second chance to play with your friends. And I'd argue that if you're playing DST with your friends, they'll naturally want to revive you before the ghost timer runs out.

For playing with strangers, perhaps the benefits of team work could be better incentivised. An example of this was mentioned in the latest stream; monsters now effectively have double their base hit points. So if you want to take down a though monster, it's easier to do it with a friend.

One idea in a similar vein; when a player dies, they only drop the items they have in their three equipment slots (and any non-replaceable items found in their inventory). If the dead player was carrying a whole stack of jerky and Thulecite for the party, it'll be lost unless the player is revived.

 

Other potential incentives could include more tangible game mechanics. For example, each character could have a minor buff aura or triggerable power which effects other players, but not themselves; Wolfgang increases the combat damage of nearby players, while Willow provides an insulation bonus and Wickerbottom reduces sanity loss of friends. And so on. These buffs certainly aren't necessary, but it naturally nudges players to want to work together.

 

An alternative route is to create situations when it would be better to have more players present than just one.

One idea is the introduction of new enemies that pick on players on their own. This could be implemented in a number of ways. For example, imagine a creature which slows stalks and then attacks players which are isolated for long periods, but would back away if the stalked player meets up with another. If the two players hang out for a little while, the stalker would vanish and wait for a new victim. Another creature idea borrowed from Left 4 Dead is an enemy which can pounce and pin down a player and slowly drain their health, hunger and/or sanity, and can only be prematurely dislodged by another player.

[Palpetinus]

I greatly support that there should be an option for every type of multiplayer player: some like to co-op, some just like being in the same world and some like PvP. A global penalty would only appeal to the co-op types of players, so I can safely say that I'd hate global punishment for one player's death. The ghost mechanics looked a little bit fun and well, for dying you have to get SOME penalty, and that penalty is a front-row seat in spectator mode.

[Elipod]

Problem, as I understand, is not in ghosts, but the fact that player's death is not permanent as long as he can rejoin with new character, so world wide permadeath was introduced instead.

If we compare to minecraft again, death on hardcore server bans player from the server forever.

[rezecib]

Problem, as I understand, is not in ghosts, but the fact that player's death is not permanent as long as he can rejoin with new character, so world wide permadeath was introduced instead.

If we compare to minecraft again, death on hardcore server bans player from the server forever.

 

Yeah, that's what I was suggesting, essentially. If you die as a ghost, you shouldn't be able to participate in the current world on that server. Beyond that, maybe you could get a start on a new world on the same server, or be a spectator, or whatever, but I agree that if players can just rejoin as a new character it effectively ruins Don't Starve's permadeath.

[SillyWilson]

I like the ghost catcher idea, and I also think we should keep the ghost mechanic. What if, if you died as a ghost, you could 'reincarnate'? Not as a player but as one of the overworld creatures (or a cave creature if you died in a cave), like say a pig (though that sounds a lil op). You could still help your friends when they recruit you with meat, but you would still eat all their meat and stuff off the ground impulsively,turn into a werepig and attack them, have to go into pighouse at night but maybe go into a spectate mode when your 'character' isn't active. You wouldn't be able to build anything or collect materials though. or maybe you could become chester, but be able to 'fetch' materials for your friend so long as you aren't full. i don't quite knowh ow yo'd become a player again though so not the best idea

[LadyMeda]

Permadeath really does seem to be the underline problem (and solution) to all of this. No permadeath=no more rogue like gameplay.

There is one thing that makes me curious though. If you are playing WITH permadeath and only one player is left alive... what happens? Do they just have to commit suicide if they want to play with their friends again? Makes sense, but seems a shame. It would be pretty fun if having only one surviving player triggered Armageddon like they had at PAX, complete with meteors and thousands of hounds.

[T4T3RGR3NAD3R]

The current system is terrible for PvP servers. If you have a big battle, it's gonna end very quickly. You should really lose max health when you craft a telltale heart, so you have to worry when the world can't save you anymore.

[Malk]

Ok so when was Wilson connected to maxwell by blood or whatever? Can't explain dat

[imsomony]

Thanks for the thoughts! Can you explain to me what you mean by this part here? 

 

The current core issue with ghosts is: what happens when the ghost expires? Do you simply revive? If so, then what's the downside to just waiting the ghost stage out? If you can't revive, then it's basically a permadeath mechanic with some softness to it.

 

Happy to walk through the thought process here.

 

Sure! @rezecib beat me to the punch already, his statements below say exactly what I was thinking. I, too, was under the impression the ghost mechanic worked as:

1. player dies, revives as a ghost
2. player haunts things, but ghost life force is draining while they look for means to revive
3. if ghost life force runs out or no revival items are available, perma-death for the player (assuming the host hasn't turned PD off)
4. player can continue watch remaining friends play the world (specatator mode), or join a new game

To what you mention about "soft perma-death", yeah, I can see that. Someone certainly shouldn't be able to hang around forever as a ghost, just casually haunting things while their buddies work on revival items. They should have thought about that before burning up all the touchstones . Wasn't the speed of life-force drain turned down so it would occur more slowly? Why not ramp it back up again? Or, the drain could speed up as life-force gets lower (like Wolfgang's hunger in-reverse)?

 

 

Wait, when ghosts were in you just revived when the ghost timed out? That seems like the core problem, right there. When a ghost times out, the character should die permanently. A permadeath mechanic with some softness to it is exactly the way it is in the core game; through great effort you can set up temporary backups should you die, but it's ultimately permadeath with some softness. If we want Together to keep the same stance, then ghost -> permadeath seems like the way to go.

 

Edit: I realized I didn't specifically address what would happen if the player disconnected and reconnected after "permadeath". I think they should probably be locked into spectator mode until a new world is started. If you allow players to reroll as another character, then that destroys the point of permadeath.

 

I think that ghosts actually do set up for more free-form play and better incentivize cooperative play than the max health reduction or permadeath mechanics do. I can easily see those other two mechanics resulting in similar emotional landscapes as games like League of Legends or Dota have when a team isn't doing so well. Ghosts, on the other hand, allow for the players to choose for themselves whether the dying player is a friend of their or not:

 

If they're a friend, then they absolutely want to revive the ghost, because they don't want to lose their teammates; that's the whole crux of why unmitigated permadeath wasn't so desirable for Together, it sucks to have a friend die because if you want to keep playing with them you basically have to start over again. So if you're on their side, you'll want to help them, to avoid that, and it looked like there were many tools at your disposal to do so.

 

If they're not a friend, then you don't care. Their life was in their own hands, maybe they were griefing you, and you'll be glad to see them gone. This seems appropriate.

 

[rezecib]

Permadeath really does seem to be the underline problem (and solution) to all of this. No permadeath=no more rogue like gameplay.

There is one thing that makes me curious though. If you are playing WITH permadeath and only one player is left alive... what happens? Do they just have to commit suicide if they want to play with their friends again? Makes sense, but seems a shame. It would be pretty fun if having only one surviving player triggered Armageddon like they had at PAX, complete with meteors and thousands of hounds.

 

I was thinking any remaining players could use the teleportato, and in the new world all dead players would respawn if they're still connected. That way the ones who managed to stay alive aren't punished so thoroughly. Armageddon seems interesting too, though. Chromiumboy also suggested monsters that picked on players who were on their own, so if there's only one left, those would take care of the last player.

 

The current system is terrible for PvP servers. If you have a big battle, it's gonna end very quickly. You should really lose max health when you craft a telltale heart, so you have to worry when the world can't save you anymore.

 

I agree, but in the last devcast they recognized that and said that whatever the current mechanics are, they're focused on coop. Once coop is in a good place, they'll look at how to mechanically support other modes, such as Hunger Games type stuff. But it would still be convenient to have a mechanic that is flexible enough to work in both, like ghosts.

 

I like the ghost catcher idea, and I also think we should keep the ghost mechanic. What if, if you died as a ghost, you could 'reincarnate'? Not as a player but as one of the overworld creatures (or a cave creature if you died in a cave), like say a pig (though that sounds a lil op). You could still help your friends when they recruit you with meat, but you would still eat all their meat and stuff off the ground impulsively,turn into a werepig and attack them, have to go into pighouse at night but maybe go into a spectate mode when your 'character' isn't active. You wouldn't be able to build anything or collect materials though. or maybe you could become chester, but be able to 'fetch' materials for your friend so long as you aren't full. i don't quite knowh ow yo'd become a player again though so not the best idea

 

Thanks . Interesting idea, but I'm not sure how it would be able to handle the requirements of being a pig - impulsively eating meat, running back to your house at night, attacking as a werepig - wouldn't that mean that under many common conditions you just wouldn't have any control at all? I guess it also has a bit of the same problems that caused them to want to scrap ghosts, with death being too drawn out into states where you had very little to do. Maybe you could just become a random creature, and gain full control over it, and then your friends had to figure out which one was you, and then do some sort of ritual to cause your ghost to pop out of it again? I could see it being really funny to become a bee and then having to try to figure out how to let my friends know that I was a bee that needed to be put on an altar or something to revive xD

[Hagenso]

What if the servers have a respon count. Once that count is null the world resets.

 

My idea is that in don't starve the amount off death you are allowed to have are equal to how many touch stone you have activated and how many meat effigy you have build.

 

So imagine a world with 4 player and a respon count of 3. If someone dies he just respons with no penalties, but the world only has 2 respons left. There is no penalty for someone dying but if too many die the world is gone.

 

Just an idea, this would of course not work on pvp servers.

 

 

 

[the truthseeker]

I was thinking any remaining players could use the teleportato, and in the new world all dead players would respawn if they're still connected. That way the ones who managed to stay alive aren't punished so thoroughly. Armageddon seems interesting too, though. Chromiumboy also suggested monsters that picked on players who were on their own, so if there's only one left, those would take care of the last player.

 

 

I agree, but in the last devcast they recognized that and said that whatever the current mechanics are, they're focused on coop. Once coop is in a good place, they'll look at how to mechanically support other modes, such as Hunger Games type stuff. But it would still be convenient to have a mechanic that is flexible enough to work in both, like ghosts.

 

 

Thanks . Interesting idea, but I'm not sure how it would be able to handle the requirements of being a pig - impulsively eating meat, running back to your house at night, attacking as a werepig - wouldn't that mean that under many common conditions you just wouldn't have any control at all? I guess it also has a bit of the same problems that caused them to want to scrap ghosts, with death being too drawn out into states where you had very little to do. Maybe you could just become a random creature, and gain full control over it, and then your friends had to figure out which one was you, and then do some sort of ritual to cause your ghost to pop out of it again? I could see it being really funny to become a bee and then having to try to figure out how to let my friends know that I was a bee that needed to be put on an altar or something to revive xD

Too many to quote so I'll use the above as latest one.

 

 

Remember, DST starts without the Teelportao feature, so no alternate world feature can be used until that is implemented.

 

This not being a core mechanic, means it won't be changed anytime soon as an option (if at all ever) for a replacement death mechanic. And no, gameplay balance is focused on first before the additional features such as caving, adventure mode or even new worlds are added to DST. 

[rezecib]

Too many to quote so I'll use the above as latest one.

 

 

Remember, DST starts without the Teelportao feature, so no alternate world feature can be used until that is implemented.

 

This not being a core mechanic, means it won't be changed anytime soon as an option (if at all ever) for a replacement death mechanic. And no, gameplay balance is focused on first before the additional features such as caving, adventure mode or even new worlds are added to DST. 

 

Huh, I guess I missed that there would be no teleportato. Seems like a very simple thing, though, as it's essentially just restarting the server but keeping inventory? But oh well. I was talking about that as a possible solution to improving the resynchronization process. Basically when someone permadies, they become desynchronized with the other players, and that's a little frustrating. More frustrating is that the only way they can play together again is by resetting the server, so having the teleportato have them meet up again was just supposed to be a slightly more graceful way of handling that.

[Paradoxical]

I personally had always assumed that if a ghost was unable to revive, that was it? As in, goodbye Mr WasAGhost from the server? If I'm playing D&D with my husband, my best friend, and his friends, and my husband wanders too far from the group, dies, and nobody can revive quick enough...he's dead. Like, that's it, he could roll a new character, but that one is dead. That's a really bare-bones example, granted, and you can always have house rules where the DM/GM running the game makes an exception if it was PARTICULARLY cheap, but generally when you die, that's it, that character is gone, reroll time. The big issue with that in Don't Starve is that you could, you know, just pick the same character again. What if when you died, and were unable to revive as a ghost, that character, for YOU, was gone as an option to "reroll" into? Like, until the server admin wiped death records, if you died as Wilson, Wilson is DEAD to you, go play as Wickerbottom or something?

 

I don't know, this is why none of the games I've worked on are multiplayer, too many little bits like this to worry about 

 

edit: specifically, I'd have an awful lot of reason to try to stay alive as a favorite character, I don't want to be stuck with just Wendy as an option eventually or something, almost everyone has a LEAST favorite character too...being forced into using them, or being forced to quit the server until the next time the admins reset it would be a huge pain and definitely something I'd fight to avoid

 

This is gonna be an awful, dumb comparison but it sprang to my mind with your idea of each character you experience permadeath with in multiplayer being straight-up DEAD to you on that server for a certain period of time.

 

The idea of losing access to a character like that is a little reminiscent of Yoshi's Story on the N64. It was to a much less drastic extent there, and that's probably one of the reasons I feel it worked well for that game, but may not work so well for DST, because in Yoshi's Story, the differences in your playable characters, if any at all, were very subtle, maybe what food a character liked best, otherwise it was really just picking your favorite color Yoshi. When that Yoshi died, it was taken away from you and you had to select another one, the fallen Yoshi would stay gone until you got a 1-up to rescue it. Still, every "life" felt a lot more genuine because each specific Yoshi would be taken away, whiddling down your numbers by individuals. Every Yoshi was a life, and once you were out of lives it was game over.

 

That could be neat for DST, but the reason I feel cautious about such a mechanic in this case is because every character plays so very differently, if you lose, say, Wigfrid, you're losing a very specialized sort of playstyle, offering its own challenges and benefits for playing that character. In one sense, like I said before, the death matters more and has gravity for you as the player because once they're gone, they are gone, at least for a period of time, and this is pretty neat because it does, albeit in a much different way from the base game, add impact to your death while still retaining the ghost mechanic in its full form. It could also urge players to step outside their comfort zones and get better with every character. I know the more I learned about Wendy she quickly became a very enjoyable playstyle despite being a much different character than Woodie or WX-78. They're all solid in their own ways, once you spend some time with them.

 

But if you died with every single character and couldn't refresh for a while, who would you play as then? Maybe you could unlock Wilton, where you can die just from another player's punch, but it at least lets you keep running around in the server in the very rare case you run out of characters to play before they're resurrected for you personally. It's an interesting possibility, nonetheless, maybe a good basis for a future server mod option.

 

Commenting just to say that I am SUPER in support of this idea. Though, I think you should have a "three strikes" kind of rule instead. 3 deaths total, and it's permadeath for you for sure. No more using any characters, have fun spectating. Maybe also require a ritual to be performed to have you "reborn" as the next character? Possibly by someone sacrificing one of their possible rebirths? That way, people have to actively be trying to bring you back for you to continue playing, and you are lowering the number of rebirths at twice the rate you're cashing them in for.

 

We could also add say, a global stat. The stat equals the number of people who have joined the server. When it reaches 0, it triggers the end of times. This way, if everyone dies/revives once, the world is destroyed. I'd like this specifically because it gives newbies/poor players more leeway. Like, it's okay that the newbie was killed by bees once, and again by getting too close to horny beefalo. They didn't know, and they will be forgiven. Three of the other players have clocked in 800+ hours on this game and will never die. Ever. Timed armageddon will come first. So it evens out. Nobody gets shunned or called/reported as a griefer for their inexperience.

 

I dunno, these are just bare bones ideas that still need to be fully polished. I am just not a fan of 100% permadeath for multiplayer, as it ruins the fun of playing Don't Starve Together with friends for me. Like, if me and a friend or two are on the same server and one of us permadies? We will probably just quit the server and join a new one, which would suck for other players who were relying on us, and whose world is now one death closer to being destroyed.

[Toros]

This is a terrible suggestion, because punishing players in a way they can't prevent is bad game design.

You can't keep people alive. You can help, but ultimately their lack of skill is the deciding factor, especially in a sandbox survival game.

OP spent a lot of time trying to get an unworkable idea to work. It won't, and any "solution" will ultimately detract from the game more than his suggestion will add to it.