Neandertal wrote:I believe this question should have been phrased differently. This should be asked hand in hand with the question of permadeath/repawn.
So I think the question should have been the following:
Do you want infinate respawn and with that the very high possibility of having to kill the same NPC multiple times.
Or
Do you want permadeath and by extention only having to kill any NPC once.
I see it this way becaese I believe these points cannot be removed form each other.
You are exactly right. In fact when Thymine made it clear on IRC that he was going ahead with posting the poll I semi-rudely suspected and accused him of intentionally phrasing/constructing the question in such a way that it would be without context and thus everyone would 'side' with him. Which turned out to be exactly what he did. This is why I tried to make clear that the context is very important. Without context the 'argument' is entirely one sided.
When I proposed the idea I actually made it clear that I was all for permadeath... AS AN OPTION. A pregame option that you could select. But it could also be incorporated into the 'clone' system just as well. If you selected not to have permadeath then death would carry a penalty of course, but the penalty would be less (or even none) if you paid more for a higher quality clone. The point of contention was solely based on the NPC following the same 'rules' of the player. Meaning if the player had a 'free' clone with penalty which allowed the player to essentially live forever by constantly coming back to life, then the NPC's get the same benefit. Thymine assumed and implied that fact would mean he'd likely and potentially often be facing the same npc's over and over. Which simply is not the case nor is it what I had intended or implied at all. Yes the same NPC would follow the same rules as the player and thus not be 'permanently' dead. However that isn't to say that you as the player ever have to encounter that NPC again. The NPC might decide ship life isn't for them anymore as it carries a significant risk of death and take an office job where you will never encounter them. One disparity between the player and NPC's that cannot really be removed is the fact that NPC's can be assumed to be living in stations behind a desk NOT flying a space ship for you to kill.
One point being that there are solutions to the logic that you might encounter the same NPC you just killed. But that is tackling the possibility of that happening with logic. But more importantly the other point is that the player shouldn't think about it at all. It simply shouldn't be on the players mind. If I kill something I don't think "Oh... gee... how is that death going to be handled? Am I going to encounter that NPC again? Is me killing it pointless?" No... I wouldn't think that. Because even if all of those held true. I still blew up their ship. They are still no longer in front of me causing me trouble. So at the end of the day, the way the question in the poll was phrased completely removes the context of what was being discussed. Now I feel like I've subjected all of you to enough of my ranting and enough of my repeating the same thing in a slightly different fashion. You are all obviously smart enough to come to whatever conclusion suits you best. Whether you think about the question beyond it's lack of context or not. As I said a few times before, with how it is phrased even I would side with Thymine.
For those who have read through my posts, thank you for listening. For those who haven't. Have a
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