We have permadeath. Great! But then we have alts. Why?

[milonti]

BaronBowden i'm just another one giving my opinion, and i can't get in the heads of the Developers, but you've got to understand not everyone has lots of free time to go around developing n characters in the case any of them dies.

Instead of the permadeath why isn't there a punishment of:
- 1 week ban for the dead character
or
- some kind of joke mask the dead character would have to wear in the case he´s killed
or
- loss of skills like when you're KOed by animals

Because none of those provide the same level of risk as losing all the work you've put into your character.

And if you dont have the time to develop your character, this probably isnt the game for you. Its not meant to be a safe crafting game. Its meant to be a mutable world mostly run by the players. You live and die in Salem as you would in real life, just with quicker progression and less severe consequences. And do-overs.

[painhertz]

Once you have an established plot and have stored some food it will honestly take less than a day or two to get back to where you belong.

Unless of course all of your stored food is stolen and your entire infrastructure is reduced to rubble. Bit harder then.

[MagicManICT]

I'm fine with permadeath (I love playing roguelike games), but having the game steer you towards the path of creating tools rather than characters takes quite a lot away from the permadeath feature.

I think this is a matter of perspective. As such, I think it could make a very powerful game mechanic. I think it makes a powerful game mechanic here, but as Teck says, it's something the devs have wanted to eliminate and encourage people to play a single character at once. I think a game that is explicitly design around the concept could be quite fascinating.

[Arillious]

Permadeath is one of the bigger attractions to this game for me. It is a refreshing change from other games. Decisions have real consequences.

The only downside is that some people will rage quit if they have a lot of time and effort put into a character when they die. I think after a few days of cooling off most of these players will come back. It takes even a casual player far less time to reach the competitive portion of Salem then it does in other games.

[Sevenless]

Once you have an established plot and have stored some food it will honestly take less than a day or two to get back to where you belong.

Unless of course all of your stored food is stolen and your entire infrastructure is reduced to rubble. Bit harder then.

What you're talking about is the death of a village. The death of a character isn't so hard to deal with. The death of a village though... yeah that's the really permanent blow.

[painhertz]

Indeed

[baronbowden]

he was making veiled threats sevenless

It was a direct reference towards me! lol

B

[painhertz]

he was making veiled threats sevenless

It was a direct reference towards me! lol

B

You place far more importance on yourself than you've earned.

[JeffGV]

The use of alts makes the whole permadeath thing meaningless. People use alts for murder and raiding and any kind of dangerous activity, so that they don't risk to lose their "main" char. A "no risk, high reward" approach. I think this game would be much more interesting if there weren't alt chars, so that we could also avoid the use of them for safe storage.
Problem is, no one thought of a reliable and affordable method to avoid their creation...the one char per account would be right in that regard, but how should they avoid logging in with multiple accounts? Controlling the IPs would cause problems for people playing in the same network, after all.

[sabinati]

alts are not zero-investment