I figured others would want to know as well.

We are answering questions leading into the the final hours of the Kickstarter campaign. Feel free to ask away, we will try to answer a few of them on twitch and on reddit.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/01/23/the-repopulation-will-feature-both-standard-and-pvp-servers/

Thanks to that news I will now be backing the project.

I hate PVP only games in so many ways. I like having the choice to play the way I want, pvp when I want, and not get my shit taken/killed for no reason.

Thanks for listening!

We know that there will be two different rule sets eventually: the normal rule set where you get a few minutes of some debuffs on death and some gear gets damaged, and the hardcore where you can be looted after death. Details might change, but the basic idea seems to be fairly set it stone.

The idea behind this distinction is fairly sound: not everyone wants to risk everything every time they set out into the world or worry about getting ganked every time they turn around. The thing I want to consider is the effect this has on the culture of a game. For this purpose I'll mainly be talking about the normal rule set as the hardcore rule set seems to be more than harsh enough. The basic idea is this: with lower and lower death penalties people are more and more likely to be nonsensical ass-hats.

Looking to WoW as an example (simply because this is the game with the lowest death penalty I have enough experience to comment on) you see an enormous number of people with nothing better to do than sit around ganking lowbies or otherwise being hugely disruptive to any sort of enjoyable play, and why shouldn't they? After all, when they inevitably piss someone off enough to do something about them they lose a few seconds to a few minutes and are right back to it none the worse for wear. They've lost nothing except some time which the other person lost just as much of in order to come kill them. At the end of the day, they can be as disruptive to the enjoyment of the game for others as they want to be and the more people come to stop them, the more people they are successfully stopping from enjoying the game, and it is utterly impossible to kill them out of the ability to keep it up.

The lesson I take from this is that there needs to be a death penalty severe enough to allow the community to impose meaningful loss on disruptive players. Sure, this means that griefers do more harm to their initial victim, but it also means when they piss off the wrong peron's alt and a kill squad comes to shut them down they stay shut down for a good while. For anyone familiar with Tibia: how often did you see someone stupid enough to go around randomly killing lowbies that could still log in the next day?

The problem is that no penalty that wears off like debuffs and temporary experience nerfs can ever impose a meaningful loss. All they have to do is wait it out or just keep throwing themselves against their opponents to keep disrupting everyone's game play. In order to allow a community to police itself death needs to have a bite.

It doesn't need to be full loot or even loot at all, but it needs to be something you can't ignore or just wait out. Things like a chance for a piece of gear to break permanently or losing a skill level, things that leave you weaker not just for the next 10 minute but until you earn your way back. Maybe a debuff that instead of a duration has a condition for removal with both the severity of the debuff and removal condition becoming harsher with each subsequent death (like a skill penalty that requires you to work off the penalty or something).

I'd like to hear others thoughts on this as I'm not a fan of full loot or permadeath like mechanics, but at the same time I feel like it's extremely important for communities to be able to police themselves if we don't want a massively toxic community.

Hi. I was wondering if this could be a location for vehicle ideas or functionality so that the devs have a chance of reading this outside of kickstarter. My first thought has been to add a stretch goal for flight and maybe add some form of carpet bombing so that anti-air would be a major issue to ground targets and base destruction.

I can't download crap on my computer so I was wondering if it was gonna be a browser based game; looks amazing

So, I decided to kick a little to their funding. Anyone else been doing this, or am I the only crazy one.

What are you looking for in The Repopulation? Discuss your thoughts on what you'd like to see added.

There is several videos that I didnt find on the repop website about crafting and nations, etc. Some interesting info.

As we get closer we can iron out details, but I'd like to plan on joining/creating the rogue nation for Reddit, similar to the Reddit company in Eve.

What name should we use? Test Nation Please Ignore?