Totem of unsinking

[finnbear]

The proposal

• In the spirit of "everyone deserves a second chance," Add a "totem of unsinking" item (doesn't have to be called that):
  • Every player has a maximum of one of them at a time
  • They are extremely rare (spawning on average every 30 minutes)
  • Once collected, they shield a player against one death. When used:
  • Player loses only between 0-50% of their score instead of all but 80 points
  • Token is destroyed
  • Analogous to Minecraft's totem of undying item except you only get one at a time
  • Alternatively, add a hidden status variable that is automatically enabled after around 30 minutes above a certain score that functions in the same way, but does not require the player to collect anything in the world

The problem this addresses

• Getting a high score requires staying alive for a very, very long time
  • There is an ever-increasing chance of making a mistake that will end the run
  • There could even be a bug or random event that ends your run (such as terrain regenerating beneath you)
• Once you die, your score is capped to 80 points (which is basically 0 from a leaderboard perspective
• In most cases, it is better to respawn as a low level ship and have the fun of re-upgrading (but when trying to get a really high score, this could be waived)

This problem was highlighted by Cannon530YT

Benefits

• Solves the majority of accidental terrain collisions
• Relatively easy to implement
• Makes leaderboard more fun
• Relatively fair to existing leaderboard scores compared to other proposed solutions
  • Never capping scores after death at 80 and making the score kept a nonlinear function (suggested by Cannon530YT)
  • The Deeeep.io method of having two separate scores, one for leaderboard purposes and one for upgrade purposes, that is way to confusing for players to work

Drawbacks

• Not 100% fair to existing leaderboard scores
• Trivializes the leaderboard a bit; people will wonder "Did bob really get 10000000 score in one playthrough, or did they use like 5 second chances...."
• More complex than current behavior for players to understand
• If a player is willing to spend infinite time, they are much more likely to achieve an arbitrarily high score. This makes the leaderboard less about skill and more about how much time you have.

[thatretrodev]

I like this idea. I can see where you got the idea from (Minecraft) so I understand how it would be used, and I do think that it's a good idea to have a last-resort way to escape a battle or prevent yourself from sinking due to colliding with the terrain.