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A game's "death penalty" plays into how careful you are about traversing the world. If you can lose gear/money/etc you are going to be a lot more careful in what you do and where you go.
Care to elaborate on what you mean?
And if we remove the bag mechanic what penalties does death now impose? A time sink of wounds and a slight durability hit? If there is no risk of losing your items, your money, etc, then what's the point of a death mechanic at all? We want the player to have a healthy respect for the dangers out in the world.
Fair enough! Let the discussion begin!
I am curious - are people generally aware of the "forfeit bag" option? Or did you have something in your bag worth that much time and effort to retrieve? You can very easily get back to "normal" by forfeiting your bag without having to retrieve it (at the cost of what was inside).
Which is precisely why we do not impose an xp penalty for death.
Many modern MMOs have trivialized death to the point that players do not respect the world. There's nothing to fear if there is nothing at stake. If there is no risk then what is the point? With no risk the sense of accomplishment when you actually succeed is greatly diminished.
The primary way our bag system differs from other MMOs (with any sort of corpse mechanic) is that you can't interact with anything until you get your bag. This is because you can't add/remove things from your inventory if you don't have it - providing the primary incentive for the player to retrieve their bag in the first place. Given that we don't impose any experience penalty this is what we arrived at after numerous iterations. And again - a player can forfeit their bag at any time and return to "normal" at the cost of what was in their bag.
I think our company has proven time and time again that we are willing to listen and have a conversation about these contentious subjects while making changes to better the game for everyone. But making statements like these because we don't make the game how you would have done it is very disingenuous.
But aren't there enough penalties already in the game? We're penalized for inv/storage, penalized for lack of gear and weapons, penalized for having to constantly run for everything we do, penalized for lack of named mobs and rare spawns that drop loot really no better than common drops, penalized by a broken RNG system... Pretty much across the board we're penalized in multiple ways constantly. With the extreme limitations we already have to endure it's just another wrench In the gears people have to try to stomach when testing your game.
I'm really sorry you feel this way. We do our best to listen to ALL feedback from ALL players. As designers we have to balance the requests of players with the design intent and see where things could be improved. And when changes are made they are typically small iterations pushing things to some sort of middle ground where most are happy. And I do not agree that we are only listening to feedback from a select few. But if we are, it's only because those select few are the only ones providing feedback. We can't act on feedback we don't receive.
