dcwoods

I can understand the frustration of not spawning with a weapon, but you have to consider that arming everyone upon spawn means just that, everyone is armed. This is a problem as it introduces the ability to PvP upon spawn -- and I don't know about you guys, but I would hate the fear of having to combat players immediately because we all know, if instant gratification is on the table, people are going to take it. When a bit of struggle is introduced (not armed on spawn), it enforces a carefulness that players have to abide by and it feels more gratifying stumbling upon a weapon. It also moderates player activity, because imagine this -- since everyone is armed by default, what's to stop a large number of players bolting to Chernogorsk and taking all the medical supplies? The game would become very much "first come, first serve" and while this is an assumption, I think there would be a laziness among players where people would camp cities with a hatchet or crossbow, making it a pain for more avid players to fish for loot due to the risk of dying from a player that spawned with a hatchet ten minutes ago. Not being armed on spawn also slows the pace of the game. It forces you to be autonomous for awhile to gather items before daringly rushing a city -- the contrary removes that barrier which is something I can't support.

This is on the right track, I'd say. However, I do think a more sympathetic wait-time would be ideal -- 20 seconds would be more realistic, at least initially. You have to consider the use-case that you need to leave your home immediately, yet you have to wait for this timer (>= one minute) before you can ensure that your character is safe. An honest action with good intent, yet facing punishment -- bad user experience. Perhaps you can, granted you can persist this time interval in some way across servers, double the wait-time for every successful log-off within an hour's time until the wait-time resets. -- So, I log-off and I get a fair 20 second wait-time. I join another server and log-off, I wait 40 seconds. Join another server, log-off and I wait 120 seconds -- then 240 seconds, etc. etc. In an hour it's 20 seconds again. You must also consider that looters and alt-f4ers will be okay with a minute or two of wait-time. Doubling it for every successful log-off will eventually reach a point where it becomes undesirable for that demographic. Thoughts?

Fortunately I searched before posting this myself. I would say a simple verification of the player via a prompt overlay would do the trick. "Are you sure you want to respawn? Your character will die and lose all items." {cancel} {respawn} -- "Your character will die and lose all items" is educational to beginners as they may make the unforgiving assumption that they can respawn with all their items, only to find out their assumption was untrue. That's one solution. The other would be to address the menu list items and perhaps assign "Respawn" to the bottom of the list and have, say, the height of a list item between "Respawn" and the rest of the menu options for clear separation. In fact, this would couple nicely with the prompt proposal anyway, as a lot of these people accidentally select "Respawn" instead of "Options" which definitely represents a usability issue in respect to element proximity. Also, I don't know if you can interact with menu options via keyboard, but I would place focus on {cancel} if the player presses the "enter" key in the prompt overlay.