Dungeons And Dragons Online: David Eckelberry Discusses the Death Penalty Change

The recent change to the death penalty has started to stir quite a discussion (argument even). On one such thread over on the official forums David Eckelberry takes a minute to give a detailed explaination:

Yes, we're watching threads like this. Yes, we're listening.

And no, I'm not going to react and "do anything" about one day's posts, or one day's play, to anything that's said here, no matter how many dire threats that someone or else issues out with. We'll wait and see how things go until the next content update. Why?

1. Today is the first day that many of you have seen this M3 content. So, you're dying a lot more times than you will after you learn it and know how to defeat it. People used to die a lot more in Tempest Spine early this summer, but not so much. They've learned, and they've gotten better, and their gear has gotten better too.

2. Today is also the first time that you've seen some of the new monsters, had access to your new spells or abilities, and it's going to take time for you to master. This is, quite simply, the learning process at work. Did you expect everything to be easy the first time? Did you really want it to be?

3. Today is the first time in 6 months that most players cared about their XP total. For the first time since you got to level 10, you care now not just about getting loot and staying at the same XP (remaining at level cap), but you're also trying to gain XP as fast as you can to get to level 12, even level 12 Rank 60.

I'm not surprised that many of you don't like the death penalty. It's not a feature you're supposed to "like." Or put another way, it's a penalty for a reason - it represents a serious reason to avoid dying as much as you can. So don't charge ahead blindly. Plan. Scout. Use your new abilities to set traps for your foes instead of the other way around. Debuff your enemies. Trip them, slow them, and reduce their ability to hurt you as much as you can. There's always endless enemies to fight, so you need to protect yourselves more than you need to kill the neverending horde of villains. Don't fight beholders or flensers on elite if you're trying to get XP. Do kill them as fast as you can when you run into them.

As a brief aside, I saw a suggestion that completing a quest, no matter how many times you die, should result in no experience loss or gain - well, that's just not very good design. Just think about it. Any great loot that any dungeon or quest reward offers up is yours for the taking, without any care to if you did it well or not. There would never be a dungeon that was too tough for you. Why not do elite dungeons on solo, entering them 15252 or more times if needed? No, that's not gameplay that should be encouraged.

Finally, I see a lot of posts about people going into elite dungeons and dying. Well, if you're running quests on elite for XP (not the brightest idea), running into CR 21 monsters, and dying a lot... well, could you consider not running quests on elite? Elite was never intended to be the "default" difficulty. If you end up net negative for XP on doing that elite quest for a loot run, well, I'm just fine with that.

Now I'm going back to playing M3 along with the rest of you. And hopefully I won't die too much either.

Makes sense to me, of course as a rogue, I don't die:)
Well maybe I do, just a few, ok lots of, times.