[Farproc]

This thread is a breakdown of things that I think WoW does right, vs. Jumpgate and EvE.

[Farproc]

* Death
Death is WoW is not a huge setback. Due to lag, or bad choices or lack of skill in PvP or PvE, or simply falling into or off something... you die. You respawn as a ghost at a nearby graveyard, and need to 'run' your ghost back to wherever your corpse is. Upon getting to your corpse you can respawn - youre alive again, with low life and energy. Your equipped gear has taken 10% damage meaning some of it may be non functional, and needs repair. The repair costs for fully damaged gear are about equivalent to the reward from a single quest/mission. In PvP people cannot take your stuff when you die.

If there are monsters around your corpse, or PvP players camping it, or it is a very long way run from the graveyard, you can speak to a ... spirit at the graveyard to get resurrected there for a 25% durability damage to all items including your inventory. This costs more. There is no experience penalty even. at all. nada.

The generally low death penalty is actually an incentive to PvP - theres very little point in griefing low level players for example as youre not really hurting them except to make their current quest take a lot longer. The low cost of loosing in PvP means that its easy for a PvE player with no experience to try his hand at PvP without fearing for loosing his ships and huge wads of cash.

Also, the fact that a quick corpse run gets you your stuff back, means its now meaningfull to try and get unique stuff.

Contrast with Jumpgates stupid fly-in-circles-for-fucking-hours to get a relic item that you loose the first time you underestimate a flux or petal proximity.

[Heretic]

and being able to go AFK without warning to attend to loved ones or something on the stove is a plus for not worrying about losing that widget

[Farproc]

I did intend to post a *lot* more on this thread, but ...

forgot.

I seem to check into this forum anually.

Question:
Has UMEC signed up for the JGE closed beta? And if so, I want in.

Or at least a solid report back on ... well ... if my major concerns have been addressed.

* Is there lots of PvE content.
* is the PvP optional. Actually optional. Like you can play the game at high levels without engaging in PvP? Not like "newbies are protected to a certain level, and/or all the compelling PvE content is actually in PvP space anyway".
--
With those out the way :-
* does JGE have a corpse retrieval system, insurance system, clones or some way to get ones shit back if/when one does die. Total loss of stuff on character death does not, imho, a fun experience make. Especially wrt obtaining unique relic items. I *loved* loosing those.
* An actual player based economy - EvE's system of buy and sell orders is great, but corrupted by NPC orders that do not map down to an underlying economy model and are thus as exploitable as JGO's matcon farming.
* JGO had 4 'career' paths, but no thought had been applied to balancing them as playable options. In WoW one can choose to gather resources (mine), quest (do missions), grind (combat missions) or tradeskill as paths to creating wealth. I would hope that in JGE, mining (if it still exists), trading, doing missions, or salvaging the results of combat are all equally profitable in terms of time spent.
* In wow, resource nodes (minerals) are widely scattered and generally protected by hostile NPCs. This makes mining (or herbing) both fun (theres combat and travel involved) and profitable. Staring at a roid with mining lasers blaring away for hours was neither fun, nor sufficiently profitable. Mining in JGE better be a shitload more about exploring for nodes - and fighting to secure them - than staring dully at the things for hours waiting for them to heat up to move on to the next.

[Farproc]

reading the comments on the JGE forums, its difficult to discern, but it seems that JGE is heading in the right direction, but is still heavilly in the wrong place.

All over again, I see complicated solutions being posited to allow "piracy" of other players items. The fact that JGE doesnt have such piracy options yet speaks of some sanity on the part of the game designers. The fact that players regard it as an attainable possibility means the game is still ... indecisive wrt the badness of forced PvP.