LotRO has a very quest heavy focus and guess what? People quest more and grind less. LotRO also has some currently pretty harsh death penalties in the form of repair costs, so guess what? Peeps get risk averse really quickly.

Consequences for foolhardiness, yes. Challenge tax, no.

I would glady exchange any of the mind numbing reputation grinds in WoW for one or a series of challenges that, if completed, would yield the faction reward. Make it hard, but make it worthwhile so I feel like I’ve accomplished more than simply staying in the saddle the longest.

"MMORPGs Are Too Easy?" That's the debate travelling the blogosphere today.
No.
Okay simple answer done, I agree with Ethic @ Kill Ten Rats when he quotes the "easy to learn, difficult to master" cliché. It's true.
The v…

The way to convince people that fewer hours of high-risk interesting play are better than countless hours of numbing grind:

Reward failure with skill-ups and successes with profit.

WoW was my first MMO, so I was really surprised to see everyone generally agree that minimizing risk is the best strategy. It’s like people who only want to play against people they know they can beat – is it even a game anymore at that point?

I’m curious about how the new generation of “higher skill combat” games will do. If you leave in grinding but just make it harder, you might just piss people off. Can a game convince people that fewer hours of high-risk, interesting play are better than countless hours of numbing grind?

Well, you generally only fight them one at a time, when they aren’t a challenge. Thats why MMOs are too easy.

I play a mage in WoW, and the more exciting fights recently have been against L70 elites that aren’t chillable. And the most recent one of those I accidentally pulled another L70 or L71 mob. Then agro’d another two in the same range before drinking and eating. In that fight I used every cooldown I had, bandaged, potted, everything.

If regular fights at the level cap actually had an interesting amount of risk in them, even if only in a couple of zones, I think there’d be less complaining about lack of skill

Things that would help: making it so each character can do one (and only one) of several things at any given time. A lot of times, there’s really only one appropriate thing. There can be interesting choices at the tactical level–slow nuke or fast nuke? big heal or little heal?–but it rarely bubbles up to the strategic level. Which isn’t bad in itself. As Jezebeau points out, if you increase this tactical complexity enough, it can make for satisfying gameplay all on its own. (also that there are existing games which let characters take on different roles.)

The timing problem is really the timing of information. The broad overview of each fight–the number of enemies and the capabilities of each–is completely known ahead of time. The things that change during the fight–big hits on the tank, random spawns and resistance changes–need to be reacted to in a matter of seconds, and so the richness of the response is necessarily limited. There’s no intermediate timeframe which would call for on-the-spot strategic thinking.

There’s also the problem that in large groups strategy tends to fall on a small number of people and the bulk of the group just follows orders. Making the game into an RTS with unreliable pieces for one guy while everyone else just plays the same old game might or might not be an improvement.