BFett wrote:I dislike Many Worlds theory because it changes the outcome of death without a safety net. In order to satisfy those who want permanent death there has to be a way to reset the character stats once the player has died. Many Worlds theory prevents this and leads to a unlimited re-spawn type of mechanic because the player can not die even though there aren't any aids to prevent death.

BFett wrote:Also, the player can always break immersion by exiting the game and starting a new universe on death of their old character. This does not need to be integrated into the game.

ThymineC wrote:

BFett wrote:I dislike Many Worlds theory because it changes the outcome of death without a safety net. In order to satisfy those who want permanent death there has to be a way to reset the character stats once the player has died. Many Worlds theory prevents this and leads to a unlimited re-spawn type of mechanic because the player can not die even though there aren't any aids to prevent death.

Well the problem isn't with the Many Worlds explanation as much as it is with the fact that we just fundamentally disagree on what game mechanics are best. You're talking about how the Many-Worlds explanation leads to infinite respawn as if that were an unintended consequence of the proposal, but that is in fact its primary motivation. I want the player to be able to survive even if they take no measures to prevent death. Punish them all you like (within reason and the scope of recoverability), but don't kill them.

BFett wrote:Also, the player can always break immersion by exiting the game and starting a new universe on death of their old character. This does not need to be integrated into the game.

Yes, you can do that, but the idea with the Many-Worlds system is that it doesn't ever necessitate actions that break immersion. A player can start a game and play it continuously and won't need to touch a menu except to save/reload when exiting/loading Limit Theory and perhaps to change graphics settings - neither of which have any effect on gameplay or the character's storyline.

And even starting a new universe with a new character isn't immersion breaking. You can imagine that each character of each universe has their own story specific to them, and what breaks immersion is using out-of-game mechanics to change (or end) that story. Simply starting a new story does not break immersion.

Edit: My mum bought cake yay. ^-^

Edit 2: And now she's yelling at me because I left the kitchen a mess.

ThymineC wrote:Yeah, but as I've been saying in other threads, the player shouldn't be forced to rely on reloading to carry on their game, since that damages immersion. Instead, there should be some immersive in-game means for allowing the player to continue playing after death. In addition, doing it through this means allows for the player to get punished appropriately for dying, something that wouldn't happen with a reload.

Hyperion wrote:*snip*

Hyperion wrote:Permanent death, but you can rent clone points at various stations and planets. So can the AI. If you die without a clone point, game over, go back to a previous save or start new. If the AI dies without a clone point, they disappear and their remaining assets become a free for all. If they have a clone point they can come back.

However this was discussed in IRC, and we came up with the idea that if a player dies, the game advances by a significant portion of time to allow for "reconstruction" and to ensure you aren't always fighting the same players over and over again. For shits and giggles we said that it should be an in game year. If you Kill an AI, it disappears for a year off to some station or planet... blow up the station or planet, they are gone for good. If the Human player on the otherhand dies, the game reverts to a historical simulation for 1 game year... the world is a little different after that time. If you had a great empire and died, it may be crumbling to dust, or you may have been replaced with ease and pushed out, or you may be welcomed back at the helm. [insert more scenarios here]

• How do you plausibly explain why it takes so long to reconstruct an agent? It would make sense if they were flesh-and-blood and being grown like clones in a vat, but I'm personally not in favour of imagining biological organisms flying around spaceships as that is implausible for its own reasons given how advanced I imagine the technology in Limit Theory to be.
• I don't think it will be as satisfying to kill NPCs if I know I'm not actually permanently killing them. In EVE Online, killing people is fun regardless of the fact that they respawn because you know that there's a real person on the other end who you just pissed off, which is always good fun. But in games where I'm playing against insentient AI, I'd much rather have those I kill remain dead. Even though your proposal avoids the whack-a-mole problem that I believe TGS' implementation would suffer from, it would still be less psychologically satisfying to know that I couldn't ever permanently end someone's existence.
• If everyone can be reconstructed, factions will become a lot more stable since killing the head of a faction is only a temporary setback for them, and their position as head of the faction will likely be reserved until they're reconstructed in a year's time, at which point they return to reclaim their position. In contrast, allowing NPCs to be permanently killed makes things a lot interesting, in the way that killing the head of a faction could create a power vacuum that causes in-fighting and backstabbing within the faction, or sparks a war between factions, or causes factions to crumble and disband. I mean, imagine how terribly boring 20th century history would have been if Franz Ferdinand could have been reconstructed.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:Hyperions system does allow for permanent death, you just have to find and destroy the reconstruction facility before they are done respawning.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:You question anothers argumentation because his game world view, not assuming mind-uploaded pilots?

ThymineC wrote:

Cornflakes_91 wrote:You question anothers argumentation because his game world view, not assuming mind-uploaded pilots?

All I said is that his system would be very plausible if we assume that everyone in LT will be flesh-and-blood individuals, but added that it's less plausible for individuals to be flesh-and-blood in a world as advanced as LT's as it would for them to be androids or mind-uploaded individuals. I think that's a fair comment to make.

Flatfingers wrote:Not at all; we simply coat all humans in a fine layer of handwavium; this protects their previous bodily fluids from disruption by the spatial fluxes caused by stellar drive systems.

In other words, in one imagining of technology, humanoids can't handle the stress and have to sleep through FTL travel or upload copies of their consciousnesses to machines, etc. But that's just one imagining; absolutely nothing requires it for Limit Theory.

It's equally acceptable to assume that starships generate a field that protects their fragile cargos from Space Madness

Flatfingers wrote:I believe most players will prefer to imagine that they are there in corpore because that feels more personal than pretending -- even if only notionally -- to be a brain-in-a-box or a robot.

Flatfingers wrote:For me, that's actually an argument in support of your third objection: when faction heads get deadified, they need to stay that way to avoid uninterestingly static factional behaviors. Characters being actual people is a valuable piece of that design argument.

I understand that the "copies of people" idea seems to you to be useful because it's consistent with your many other suggestions for how the LT universe might be constructed. And I am normally a fan of internal consistency.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:Hyperions system does allow for permanent death, you just have to find and destroy the reconstruction facility before they are done respawning.

You question anothers argumentation because his game world view, not assuming mind-uploaded pilots?

Cornflakes_91 wrote:Thymine:
*applies logic to the rest of zhe game*
Why do we use non-missle weapons in the game, longer range, simpler carrier systems, devastating hits... why even bother with laser weapons which would have much shorter ranges and much worse damage-to-weight ratio, expensive carrier systems etc.

Why dont we have practically unlimited sensor range in game? in RL we can detect the 1W energy output of the voyager probes over dunnohowfar distances. And that is archieved by already outdated equipment.

Cornflakes_91 wrote:So why force this transhumanism (that would surely alienate a portion of the playerbase) that makes absolutely NO impact on gameplay?

Cornflakes_91 wrote:We could even handwave it away by saying that it prove impossible to upload people, for whatever reason

David Pearce wrote:Some investigators of consciousness even dedicate their lives to that end; what might a notional insentient AGI suppose we're doing? There is no evidence that serial digital computers have the capacity to do anything of the kind - or could ever be programmed to do so. Digital computers don't know anything about conscious minds, unitary persons, the nature of phenomenal pleasure and pain, or the Problem of Other Minds; it's not even "all dark inside". The challenge for a conscious mind posed by understanding itself "from the inside" pales into insignificance compared to the challenge for a nonconscious system of understanding a conscious mind "from the outside". Nor within the constraints of a materialist ontology have we the slightest clue how the purely classical parallelism of a subsymbolic, "neurally inspired" connectionist architecture could turn water into wine and generate unitary subjects of experience to fill the gap. For even if we conjecture in the spirit of Strawsonian physicalism - the only scientifically literate form of panpsychism - that the fundamental stuff of the world, the mysterious "fire in the equations", is fields of microqualia, this bold ontological conjecture doesn't, by itself, explain why biological robots aren't zombies. This is because structured aggregates of classically conceived "mind-dust" aren't the same as a unitary phenomenal subject of experience who apprehends "bound" spatio-temporal objects in a dynamic world-simulation. Without phenomenal object binding and the unity of perception, we are faced with the spectre of what philosophers call "mereological nihilism". Mereological nihilism, also known as "compositional nihilism", is the position that composite objects with proper parts do not exist: strictly speaking, only basic building blocks without parts have more than fictional existence. Unlike the fleetingly unitary phenomenal minds of biological robots, a classical digital computer and the programs it runs lacks ontological integrity: it's just an assemblage of algorithms. In other words, a classical digital computer has no self to understand or a mind recursively to improve, exponentially or otherwise. Talk about artificial "intelligence" exploding is just an anthropomorphic projection on our part.