Oh so that’s the problem with WoW, they want you to play 8-hours a day! ;)

I do think that WoW’s death penalty is frivolous. It’s meaningless, but actually I like it right now since I have very little play time and I know that at most a death will set me back ~5 min, while logging on my EQ raid character will take me ~15 to get set up before I fight, and a death, if it happens, will be half an hour to rez, rebuff, get back, etc. AO had those reclaim booths, and unless you were reckless, you stood to lose nothing at all (some people even would use them to teleport around). CoH’s experience debt system worked for me as well, although again it was a bit heavy at some points, but has been lessened since. I don’t recall DAoC’s (teleported to a town and damage on equipment maybe?), and no idea what EQ2 does. It’s the one mmorpg I’ve avoided.

There is no perfect system isn’t there, as everyone wants something different. Wow even has the two tiered rez system with taking damage and a few minutes of lessened stats rather than fetching your corpse. No loss of items/corpse = win for me.

A harsher death penalty does increase immersiveness though. You have a stake in that character. You know you have something to lose. However, that should be balanced with monsters/game creatures that you can beat. You shouldn’t have to fight something that has a 70% chance of beating you just for minor progress. Progress is good, and builds that character stake, and retains people.

Lot of talk about immersion and what helps increase it lately. Sounds like a good branch off topic!

1) Class/level based MMOs bore me to shit. BAM hit level 60 with mage type now go back and do the same chit with fighter type…oh crap Im level 4 again and bored to shit cause I know whats coming up and oh yeah cant play with my level 45 friends…..
I like EvE’s skill based system, given enough time you can do whatever you desire. Also with EvE the skills are setup such that getting to lvl 3 is not too painfull and the difference between lvl 3 and lvl 5 is usually pretty minimal. So a two year old character can meaningfully interact with a 2 month old charater.

2)Meaningfull content: In CoH we used to joke around about how good the villians lawyers were. In WoW you see the samething, villians never die, nothing changes. EvE is the same with the NPC content…HOWEVER…EvEs NPC content is kind of a “hey its here if you want it” thing. The big thing in EvE is the players and the Devs support this. The Devs actually report on the big player news, they report when an alliance breaks up or when an old corp is revived. Not only that but major changes can be made by layers. When the guiding hand social club took down that corp they took down the victim was honestly affected. They weren’t back the next day with all their chit intact.
I see this as the big move in future MMOs, let the players make the content. Start with a bit of NPCism and slowly fade it out as players take over the role. Seed out the blu print to make item a and then take out the NPC….been too long since item a was around slowly bring back the NPCs.
EvE does one other thing that helps in this area, players are neutral. In classic games there is a subconscious aftertaste of alignment and that affects things. EvE does away with this and allows players to take the role of good and bad as they see fit.

3) dynamic environments: now this is a technology based complaint but in games like WoW and CoH I want to see dynamic weather and other environmental effects. CoH had planned for player actions to affect the environment but soon realized this would be abused as people would just go around destroying stuff (I see their point but I would have realy liked the effects) I want snow in winter and rain in summer, I like that games include day and night (incidently is WoW on a 24 hour timer, CoH was on like a 4 hour timer or something). I would like to see rivers swell and fade and trees change color. At the same time I wanna see mines get stripped and animal populations become endangered.
With a game like EvE it would be nice to see how orbits affect the environment. And who hasnt wanted to land and stretch their legs.
I think for a game like EvE a good solution would be to do a meta verse type deal.

::So here it is, my dream MMO::
First off the “Universe” is actually a metaverse backend. The “space” portion is handled by one company and their client while “worlds” are leased to other companies. The clients are seemless, so when I land at a station and get out of the ship I load into the new client (via loading screen mabey, but in the perfect MMO this is fully transparent.
NPC only fill roles that are needed but that the player base lacks. The entire system is dynamic, farm all the warthogs on one planet and boom they are gone…..unless some traveler brings some new ones. There are no “shards” we are all together and the world is fully persistant (since we are dreaming updates are done real time and transparently without need to down the server). Death would be meaningfull, if your world/area has sufficently high technology clone vats may be available, but otherwise when you die, you die.

Tis a dream

In the larger sense, attempts to thread that needle and present a gameplay experience that will be strongly compelling to all or most of the types of MMO player out there are mostly going to end in tears and recriminations (see: Star Wars Galaxies, Horizons, WoW’s PvP/BG/Honor system).