Crimson Lucario said:
That only applies to competitive FPS PLAYERS, not FPS games, death is meaningless in CoD for any but the hardcore and s&d players, domination and TDM aren't feard by the average player.
You seem to misunderstand me: By competitive FPS, I'm refering to games like Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Battlefield etc. I mean competitive as opposed to collaborative.
Now, if you're going to say that death is meaningless in CoD, or similar games, I'm going to have to disagree. Over the course of a game, if I progressively die more times than I accomplish something (Completing objectives, getting kills), I feel like I'm doing poorly. It matters to me, and most players. There's a reason people try to survive. The amount of times people spend trying to increase their KDR through boosting, or SPM through Capture Only modes demonstrates just how much people care. It's bragging rights, and it's the feeling of accomplishment that people work towards, the feeling that you're accomplishing MORE, and that you're doing better. It's empowerment through competition. Now, the individual death itself isn't important. I'm talking more about rates, in the mathematical sense, rather than the individual death for the life. Individual deaths don't usually matter, and the focus drifts from individual lifes to the overall match, and my play in general: Dying without accomplishing something isn't fun, or something most of us are proud of, so we avoid it: We try different tactics, we flank, we hide, whatever. Dying over and over is not fun, and it feels like we're getting nowhere. We're afraid of death, because frequent death represents a lack of ability to beat our enemies, and most of us are playing to have fun by beating our enemies. We want the most kills or captures to a life.
Now, as a person who's played Harcore SnD and Counter Strike in actual competitions (Not talking about genres now), mostly just semi-casual ladders, dying has an impact, but it's an extrinsic impact. I don't care about dying because I'm scared that my character's dying or my life is ending. It's entirely meta: I'm not doing my part for my team. I'm certainly forced into a different playstyle, but the mindset isn't really that different: I feel LESS effective. Now, I'll happily sacrifice a life in a match as a distraction, as long as it feels effective. So again, death in multiplayer FPS is usually about effectiveness. There's no easy way to implement this intrinsicly into the game, and I'm not sure you'd want to.
Why did I have to explain this to this level of detail? I'm sure you understand all of this, and I'm certain that you're smart enough to have extrapolated all of this? When did people stop reading between the lines?
I think it's a
bad idea to try to add in more motivation not to die in competitive multiplayer FPS games. The fear of death in these games is based on the desire to do better, and heck, the entire genre's been building on the idea of kill streaks and other rewards for successful play, because players enjoy positive reinforcement, whilst artificially making death more terrifying simply annoys players: Particularly new players, who may be less skilled. Taking their experience on every death is bad (As an asside, the negative reinforcement will hurt the players who are doing worse, which fucks with the balance even more than usual). Making it harder on each death is bad. Heck, the hike back to battle on some games is bad enough, you can spend most of your match walking to the fight.
