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Anonymous
"Lose Harder" Mechanics 2017-09-04 01:00:55 Post No. 389245513
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"Lose Harder" Mechanics 2017-09-04 01:00:55 Post No. 389245513
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How does /v/ feel about "lose harder" mechanics, and what are some games that do it especially wrong or right in your opinion?
To explain, lose harder mechanics are things that ensure a losing player will keep losing. For example, in the game Transistor you get to re-try a fight after losing, but this costs you one of your skills. Which means not only are you fighting a battle that's hard enough to lose the first time, but you're also going into it with a pretty harsh penalty, making it more likely that you'll lose again. This is also a common thing in MOBAs, since a team that's losing early on will often get less resources (gold, experience, etc) which puts them in a worse spot for the rest of the game, sometimes to the point where an early loss means you might as well give up.
There are also less obvious examples. For example, if you're low on health in a fighting game this usually doesn't affect your character, but it still means you can't keep playing the same way you would if you were at high health, because getting punished on a risky move will mean you instantly lose and sometimes you can't even block because the chip damage might kill you.
And then there are games that try to reverse this by giving a losing player certain advantages. Think of racing games that slow the opponents down when you're behind and speed them up when you're ahead, to make it so you're never entirely sure if you'll win or lose. Or games like Bioshock that make you take less damage when you're at low health and deal more damage when you're almost out of ammo, to give you a better chance to just barely win a fight you otherwise would've lost.
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as a rule, eveything ASSFAGGOTS do is bad and retarded, and so is your mechanic of lulz harder
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They aren't necessarily wrong or bad. They're just the rules of the game and you have to play by them. As long as everyone is playing by the same rules, it's fair.
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>>389245513
>Lose harder
It's called the slippery slope effect, no need to make new terms up
It's not actually detrimental to games or competition. Many highly regarded games have such mechanics built into the design, such as Chess (i.e. first to give up an important piece has to deal with inferior options for the rest of the game on account of the initial error)
In a MMA fight, whoever gets that initial advantage (i.e. initial strikes, good position, a takedown, etc.) is technically ahead, but it is far from assured
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I wouldn't call stuff like having less health meaning risky moves are unviable or losing a chess peice a difficulty mechanic, that's part of natural gameplay, you have X amount of chances to fuck up, the more times it happens you have to change your approach.
An actual comparison would be a Fighting Game or Chess tournament where each loss meant starting the next game with reduced health or prices.
Like Demon's Souls, where dying makes you resoawn with 50% hp until you beat a boss or use a very limited item. It's not a great mechanic because you usually die more than once per level, so playing with reduced max hp just becomes the standard, and the game is balanced to be beatable with half hp, so after a point 100% hp becomes more like a rare bonus than the default, except the ui makes it clear your hp bar is half greyed out.
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