"And why isn't nullsec viable do you think? You got every ore in null so less hauling involved for high end minerals which have to come from there (or WH's)."
A fair enough question. To answer it you might first look at the differences between NPC stations and player outposts. NPC stations are generally hugely superior in the amount and manufacturing and research lines available, as well as the efficiency of the refinery. Additionally, there are many NPC systems that have multiple stations, whilst players are limited to creating one outpost per system. Additionally, NPC stations can refine and research and manufacture and have many offices, whilst player created outposts must each choose a single function. So Industrialists must accumulate ore in system A to refine it, then move it to system B to sell it.
Hauling high end minerals vs having them as a local resource is a trivial consideration. The real cost of hauling a jump freighter full of Zydrine or Megacyte is a very small percentage of the absolute value - considerably less than 1%. It is less than the daily fluctuations of the mineral price in Jita. So a local source of high ends makes no difference to 0.0 industry.
And of course hi-sec industrialists benefit from CONCORD protection, which is very valuable. Nullsec industrialists have to rely in the protection provided by their alliance. If 0.0 industry was inherently much more profitable, then I am pretty sure that plenty of industrialists would be happy to factor in higher losses as an overhead. But empire industrialists currently have every advantage.
You have to hand a huge amount of rewards for most to consider the risk worth it which makes the carebears almost feel like unwanted.
And here comes the big issue, if a game would have only people in a high danger zone giving them all huge rewards would just create insane inflation and result in the rewards actually not being that good and people disliking the danger again.
That's why games with meaningful deaths usually don't attract many people. Unless you give them zones where dying is very unlikely. .
Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt. Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.
full loot is pointless because no one will carry their best gear, for fear it will be looted.
So everyone just has trash gear, stuff that's replaceable.
Why would you spend forever getting some gear that in two seconds is gone when you're looted? It would be pointless.
IN PvP it's either going to be boring, or you're going to be ganked.
If it's "fair" it's boring. That's the instanced battle zones where the parties are matched up and an even number go fight in an instance. Boooooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrriinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnngggg.
If it's not instanced, then you're going to run into overwhelming numbers that gank you.
Who wants to lose their best gear over getting ganked?
Two things about your collection of myths and misinformation there:
1) UO and EVE Online have extensive histories of PvPers bringing everything from mob drops to top gear into battle on a regular basis.
2) As stated several times before by various people on these forums, full loot MMOs are designed differently. The coveted rare drop purple that you ran a hamster wheel for a week or two to get is neither rare nor an IWIN button in full loot PVP games. Most of the needed stuff is readily replacable. A lot of the desired stuff is usually accessible, but it isn't a gamebreaker by any stretch if you can't get it. Unfortunately, with the release of some recent shallow FFA PVP games trying to pass themselves off as spiritual successors to UO, their gameplay has become the de facto talking point for those who dislike full loot PVP, despite over a decade of the mechanic in other MMOs proving otherwise.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Oi! We're not talking about actual death here, we're talking about penalties for losing.
Why are death penalties so slight now? Because character death is unpredictable in current designs. Hell, at any time you even log in, your character could be killed by something and you won't be able to do anything about it. That is a fact in nearly every single online game with a persistent world.
Games like blood bowl? You choose to start a match, you choose to take the risk. Your account is not under siege at the main menu when you log in. Your characters are not being attacked while you choose a match and set things up. When you've lost the match, the stuff you lost is of no value to anyone, it's just gone. While you're logged out, your progress won't be harmed by anything.
Games like EVE? The moment you log in anywhere, you could be annihilated by something. Your station could be under assault, your character's ship may auto-warp into the middle of a corporate conflict with AoEs being dished out everywhere. When you lose, your stuff would be left for your enemies to collect, probably very valuable stuff (also probably the reason why your character was targeted in the first place). If you're in 0 sec, you could be camped for a few hours. If you have any external assets like a POS, expect that to be raided and gone once it's discovered - which you will never know until it's too late. At least your character doesn't lose progress through all this crap that could happen.
Games like WoW? The moment you log in, somebody right next to you could be trying to start another plague catastrophe. Or maybe you accidentally logged out in the middle of a fight due to connection troubles, and while you're loading, your character is being ripped apart by some rather difficult mobs that you could never handle without getting the jump first. So you load and your character's dead. Or maybe you wind up in the middle of a PVP war, and just then realize that you logged out earlier with your PVP flag on or are a resident of an open PVP server. Thank goodness the penalty for death isn't too heavy, huh?
In blood bowl, there is a steady pulse of the building and relieving of tension, designed by the player so it's a predictable experience. In the latter two games, the tension is less predictable. Things have been done in those games to compensate for this.
Now let's analyze some single player games that have death penalties. Say, Minecraft and Left 4 Dead.
In Minecraft, if you die, you drop all your stuff and you likely have no idea where to find it again. You do respawn if you so choose, but you don't have anything. So your goods are pretty much gone or it'll be a happy coincidence if you find them before they disappear. Saved games do not progress in time while not being played, so you never have to worry about waking up in a pit of lava or swarm of spiders and losing all your stuff... unless, of course, you saved and quit while in such a predicament. When you leave your survival shelter, you're under no threat of danger while traversing the landscape in the daylight, but when you go underground into the darkness, or it turns night, then you can start to expect danger. Screams of monsters during the day aren't as eerie as they are at night, because you know that daylight hurts them. Daybreak / daylight / light in general is relaxation of tension, while nightfall / night / darkness in general is the creation of tension.
How about another one - Left 4 Dead. When you load a level, you're in a safe place. The baddies outside the safe place are relatively easy to dispatch. When a signal sounds, you can expect a horde to spawn and come rushing towards your position, but never right where you're looking or right where your team is occupying, so you have a little time to prepare. If you get overrun, you can still be saved by teammates. If you die, you lose your fancy weapons and gear (which can still eb salvaged by teammates), but can enter the fray again later if your team survives long enough to get to a locked room in which you can respawn. The silence and predictable wandering of local zombies between hordes is the trough of tension, while the horde call, music, and screams of special zombies are the peak of it.
Minecraft's tension is predictable. You're fine in the daylight so long as you don't fall down a hole or jump off a cliff into a lake of lava (all your fault!), but you're not fine in the darkness and you can tell very easily when there is an absence of light or when night is coming. Left 4 Dead is also predictable - you can hear the special enemies around you, and there are signals to warn you of incoming hordes and bosses. The silence serves as the aftermath of a high-tension situation and the preparation for the next, while the hordes and special infected serve as the building and eventual height of tension.
Both games are fun in their own right. Their death penalities are scaled well with how the games are played, and they can be because they're predictable. If they weren't predictable, the designers could not anticipate what a good overall punishment for defeat could be.
For players, if the liklihood of defeat is too unpredictable and they can never be sure when or where there is risk, then there will never be a point of relief to break from the tension. Without any release of tension, the game becomes unbearable and undesirable to play. However, people are very willing to play games that are the opposite of that, ones which have very little tension build-up, but lots of other incentives to play (such as unlockable rewards and achievements, loot, and etc.).
For designers, if the game isn't predictable in design due to its size or certain implications of added interactivity, then a suitably roller-coaster-like experience cannot be constructed within it.
So guess what?
In games where interactions between players and players (and even players and environment) are less predictable, the penalty for death - for defeat - is very slight. Other incentives besides the thrill of confrontation and risk are used to get players to play, such as the thrill of collecting carrots.
Unless some amount of base predictability is built into the game or discovered by the user after the first few minutes of play, it will not be desirable to play by a majority.
It is still a grounbreaking game achievement. I just wish someone could clean up the UI.
Slap in STO'S ship UI with a few minor improvements to match EVE, and it would be pretty sweet.
Despite the recent speedbumps and anti gamer moves like 40 dollar shirts, im still considering re- upping my sub, just to check the new stuff. I got some ships,Nothing fancy , but it is a fun game, the UI just makes my wrists and brain hurt.
Have a sense of humor, no need to get ALL MODDY ! A Simpson's quote shouldn't be worth a warning. You are lucky anyone is bothering to read this rag.
I am just going to throw this out there and not read any posts (not that it would change what I am going to post).
MMORPGs are to the pain (not death). So much pain that you black out a lot, have out of body experiences, and are willing to spend money (lots and lots of it) to keep from feeling it. magic just makes the pain less (kind of like opiates, but you get fewer news stories talking about people ODing on magic).
ok now for the serious part. @OP - Permadeath isn't feasible in an online game, and if you try and implement some kind of system to make it work, you have to figure out how to make it work when yoiu have players who get disconnected from the internet, you have players griefing other players, and you want to make a game challenging and fun.
permadeath doesn't make death matter more, and harsher punishments don't make death matter more. People play a game to have fun, and people aren't perfect. Players make mistakes and learn from them because those failures are inherently undesired in a game. Do you know any people who like being bad at a game? Do you know any people who would like a game more if they were punished based on their level of skill?
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
Life is short! So let's waste it on painful death penalties!!!!
I think I just destroyed your arguement.
no, you fell into a logic flaw. the point of death penalties is to avoid death not to die every 5min and whine for each of them.
death penalty is to...protect life.
this argument may be too much for you.
Actually it's not, but maybe you don't get what I'm saying. Ad hominem attacks are so lame.
If you believe your real life is too short; like the OP is saying, then why would you implement something that limits fun and adds in the prospect of wasting your time when you do make a mistake, lag, get ganked and so on.
The whole arguement makes no sense. So your "logic flaw" is just grasping at straws.
The problem with major death penalty in MMORPG is that, the gameplay is usually very boring, especially leveling up.
Well designed death penalty makes you feel a challenge and want to learn to play better at its mechanics, to achieve a better result next time.
In current MMORPG, 95% of your death is because your 'numbers' aren't high enough, either your armor value isn't high enough to survive the encounter, or your attack isn't good enough to create sustaniable damage. Simply to say, there is nothing you can do in the immediate future to make you better, you can only grind more and level up so you can try it again later. MMORPG is a game where time is the most important factor, not skill or tactics. It doesn't require a lot of knowledge to play the game, you press 5 or 6 hotkeys, maybe a few more if you are at max level, but the most important factor to your success is still how much time you have put in to make your character better.
A lot of MMOG players like to talk like there are many levels of strategy in traditional combat, I'm sure people will reply to this and try to say I'm wrong, but there isn't much strategy in MMOG, at least not as much as other genre or playstyle. In any kind of competition, player's reaction aka twitch, is fundamental to any kind of fair competition. RTS genre has arguably the most strategy involved, yet the most important factor that decides in professional players is that 'APM' how many action you can perform in a given minute. One main element in strategetic combat is that opponent shouldn't have to wait for your response, yet in MMORPG a lot of, presumably, older players are heavily against reactionary gameplay, citing the game should be about their characters, not themselves. While the reason is logically fine, just don't expect much fun competition or any heavier death penalities.
Bigger dealth penalties, eg: perma death, requires a game to have completely player based, how good a player is defines the succes of that character, in any fair competition, whether PVE or PVP, a player should be able to, complete any given challenge, disregarding their level, excepting varying difficulty to create a parity between skilfull players and noobish palyers. say single player/online lobby based games for example. CoF or Battlefront, a player at level 1 can kill a max level player at any given moment, yet it wont be as easy because of experience and knowledge of the game. Players in Assassin's creed can theoratically finish the entire game without any upgrades or leveling up, yet it will make the game extremely hard to complete, but in the end, you can compensate that with palyer skill. In the end, MMOG doesn't offer that kind of experience, there is no chance for that a loew level character able to complete any higher level content without getting one shot, or be able to dodge that one shot attack. MMOG needs to be less of a numbers game, but about how players actually play the game.
Dealth penalty is there to create a desire in the player to improve, not to make you feel, "well f*** that, I've just wasted the last hour to have to do this quest all over again"
Death penalty should pose a challenge, not a time sink.
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW? As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
Life is short! So let's waste it on painful death penalties!!!!
I think I just destroyed your arguement.
no, you fell into a logic flaw. the point of death penalties is to avoid death not to die every 5min and whine for each of them.
death penalty is to...protect life.
this argument may be too much for you.
Actually it's not, but maybe you don't get what I'm saying. Ad hominem attacks are so lame.
If you believe your real life is too short; like the OP is saying, then why would you implement something that limits fun and adds in the prospect of wasting your time when you do make a mistake, lag, get ganked and so on.
The whole arguement makes no sense. So your "logic flaw" is just grasping at straws.
I highlighted in red the incorrect assumption that you're making. Obviously for some people, having a death penalty adds to the fun. Simply because you're not one of them doesn't mean that it's not possible to enjoy an element of risk. I personally find life way to short to endlessly grind mobs and raids with no element of risk or unpredictability. That's just work as far as I'm concerned, and I would literally rather just go to work and "grind up" something real than grind up pixels by killing scripted sprites.
Did I just destroy your argument?
My GF likes reading those fashion/gossip magazines. I personally would pay to not read them because I find them unbelievably boring and irritating, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't enjoy them, and clearly hundreds of thousands of other people enjoy them too. I dont make a huge fuss and post obvious logical fallacies in a campaign to try and make all magazines into The Economist and Scientific American - both of which she finds unreadably dull.
I just buy my magazines for me and she buys her magazines for her. All you have to do is play your game with no death penalty, and let me play my game with a death penalty. Different strokes for different folks. Just accept that some people will like stuff you dont like and that it's OK
Bigger dealth penalties, eg: perma death, requires a game to have completely player based, how good a player is defines the succes of that character, in any fair competition, whether PVE or PVP, a player should be able to, complete any given challenge, disregarding their level, excepting varying difficulty to create a parity between skilfull players and noobish palyers...
...Death penalty should pose a challenge, not a time sink.
Player skill should be very important, in FPS games this usually works out fine since most equipment is the same. The problem is that MMO's are designed in a way that "Skill Levels" & "Gear" create the difference between a fresh player and a veteran. The new player or "noob" might be a far better player but the veteran has superior equipment and skill levels resulting in a massive edge over this new player.
Comments
You have to hand a huge amount of rewards for most to consider the risk worth it which makes the carebears almost feel like unwanted.
And here comes the big issue, if a game would have only people in a high danger zone giving them all huge rewards would just create insane inflation and result in the rewards actually not being that good and people disliking the danger again.
That's why games with meaningful deaths usually don't attract many people. Unless you give them zones where dying is very unlikely. .
Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.
Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.
Two things about your collection of myths and misinformation there:
1) UO and EVE Online have extensive histories of PvPers bringing everything from mob drops to top gear into battle on a regular basis.
2) As stated several times before by various people on these forums, full loot MMOs are designed differently. The coveted rare drop purple that you ran a hamster wheel for a week or two to get is neither rare nor an IWIN button in full loot PVP games. Most of the needed stuff is readily replacable. A lot of the desired stuff is usually accessible, but it isn't a gamebreaker by any stretch if you can't get it. Unfortunately, with the release of some recent shallow FFA PVP games trying to pass themselves off as spiritual successors to UO, their gameplay has become the de facto talking point for those who dislike full loot PVP, despite over a decade of the mechanic in other MMOs proving otherwise.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Oi! We're not talking about actual death here, we're talking about penalties for losing.
Why are death penalties so slight now? Because character death is unpredictable in current designs. Hell, at any time you even log in, your character could be killed by something and you won't be able to do anything about it. That is a fact in nearly every single online game with a persistent world.
Games like blood bowl? You choose to start a match, you choose to take the risk. Your account is not under siege at the main menu when you log in. Your characters are not being attacked while you choose a match and set things up. When you've lost the match, the stuff you lost is of no value to anyone, it's just gone. While you're logged out, your progress won't be harmed by anything.
Games like EVE? The moment you log in anywhere, you could be annihilated by something. Your station could be under assault, your character's ship may auto-warp into the middle of a corporate conflict with AoEs being dished out everywhere. When you lose, your stuff would be left for your enemies to collect, probably very valuable stuff (also probably the reason why your character was targeted in the first place). If you're in 0 sec, you could be camped for a few hours. If you have any external assets like a POS, expect that to be raided and gone once it's discovered - which you will never know until it's too late. At least your character doesn't lose progress through all this crap that could happen.
Games like WoW? The moment you log in, somebody right next to you could be trying to start another plague catastrophe. Or maybe you accidentally logged out in the middle of a fight due to connection troubles, and while you're loading, your character is being ripped apart by some rather difficult mobs that you could never handle without getting the jump first. So you load and your character's dead. Or maybe you wind up in the middle of a PVP war, and just then realize that you logged out earlier with your PVP flag on or are a resident of an open PVP server. Thank goodness the penalty for death isn't too heavy, huh?
In blood bowl, there is a steady pulse of the building and relieving of tension, designed by the player so it's a predictable experience. In the latter two games, the tension is less predictable. Things have been done in those games to compensate for this.
Now let's analyze some single player games that have death penalties. Say, Minecraft and Left 4 Dead.
In Minecraft, if you die, you drop all your stuff and you likely have no idea where to find it again. You do respawn if you so choose, but you don't have anything. So your goods are pretty much gone or it'll be a happy coincidence if you find them before they disappear. Saved games do not progress in time while not being played, so you never have to worry about waking up in a pit of lava or swarm of spiders and losing all your stuff... unless, of course, you saved and quit while in such a predicament. When you leave your survival shelter, you're under no threat of danger while traversing the landscape in the daylight, but when you go underground into the darkness, or it turns night, then you can start to expect danger. Screams of monsters during the day aren't as eerie as they are at night, because you know that daylight hurts them. Daybreak / daylight / light in general is relaxation of tension, while nightfall / night / darkness in general is the creation of tension.
How about another one - Left 4 Dead. When you load a level, you're in a safe place. The baddies outside the safe place are relatively easy to dispatch. When a signal sounds, you can expect a horde to spawn and come rushing towards your position, but never right where you're looking or right where your team is occupying, so you have a little time to prepare. If you get overrun, you can still be saved by teammates. If you die, you lose your fancy weapons and gear (which can still eb salvaged by teammates), but can enter the fray again later if your team survives long enough to get to a locked room in which you can respawn. The silence and predictable wandering of local zombies between hordes is the trough of tension, while the horde call, music, and screams of special zombies are the peak of it.
Minecraft's tension is predictable. You're fine in the daylight so long as you don't fall down a hole or jump off a cliff into a lake of lava (all your fault!), but you're not fine in the darkness and you can tell very easily when there is an absence of light or when night is coming. Left 4 Dead is also predictable - you can hear the special enemies around you, and there are signals to warn you of incoming hordes and bosses. The silence serves as the aftermath of a high-tension situation and the preparation for the next, while the hordes and special infected serve as the building and eventual height of tension.
Both games are fun in their own right. Their death penalities are scaled well with how the games are played, and they can be because they're predictable. If they weren't predictable, the designers could not anticipate what a good overall punishment for defeat could be.
For players, if the liklihood of defeat is too unpredictable and they can never be sure when or where there is risk, then there will never be a point of relief to break from the tension. Without any release of tension, the game becomes unbearable and undesirable to play. However, people are very willing to play games that are the opposite of that, ones which have very little tension build-up, but lots of other incentives to play (such as unlockable rewards and achievements, loot, and etc.).
For designers, if the game isn't predictable in design due to its size or certain implications of added interactivity, then a suitably roller-coaster-like experience cannot be constructed within it.
So guess what?
In games where interactions between players and players (and even players and environment) are less predictable, the penalty for death - for defeat - is very slight. Other incentives besides the thrill of confrontation and risk are used to get players to play, such as the thrill of collecting carrots.
Unless some amount of base predictability is built into the game or discovered by the user after the first few minutes of play, it will not be desirable to play by a majority.
Great topic love the post!
Sometimes I like Eve, Othertimes I hate it.
It is still a grounbreaking game achievement. I just wish someone could clean up the UI.
Slap in STO'S ship UI with a few minor improvements to match EVE, and it would be pretty sweet.
Despite the recent speedbumps and anti gamer moves like 40 dollar shirts, im still considering re- upping my sub, just to check the new stuff. I got some ships,Nothing fancy , but it is a fun game, the UI just makes my wrists and brain hurt.
Have a sense of humor, no need to get ALL MODDY !
A Simpson's quote shouldn't be worth a warning. You are lucky anyone is bothering to read this rag.
I am just going to throw this out there and not read any posts (not that it would change what I am going to post).
MMORPGs are to the pain (not death). So much pain that you black out a lot, have out of body experiences, and are willing to spend money (lots and lots of it) to keep from feeling it. magic just makes the pain less (kind of like opiates, but you get fewer news stories talking about people ODing on magic).
ok now for the serious part. @OP - Permadeath isn't feasible in an online game, and if you try and implement some kind of system to make it work, you have to figure out how to make it work when yoiu have players who get disconnected from the internet, you have players griefing other players, and you want to make a game challenging and fun.
permadeath doesn't make death matter more, and harsher punishments don't make death matter more. People play a game to have fun, and people aren't perfect. Players make mistakes and learn from them because those failures are inherently undesired in a game. Do you know any people who like being bad at a game? Do you know any people who would like a game more if they were punished based on their level of skill?
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
Actually it's not, but maybe you don't get what I'm saying. Ad hominem attacks are so lame.
If you believe your real life is too short; like the OP is saying, then why would you implement something that limits fun and adds in the prospect of wasting your time when you do make a mistake, lag, get ganked and so on.
The whole arguement makes no sense. So your "logic flaw" is just grasping at straws.
Just accept the fact that you're already dead and you'll stop caring about death penalties in games
The problem with major death penalty in MMORPG is that, the gameplay is usually very boring, especially leveling up.
Well designed death penalty makes you feel a challenge and want to learn to play better at its mechanics, to achieve a better result next time.
In current MMORPG, 95% of your death is because your 'numbers' aren't high enough, either your armor value isn't high enough to survive the encounter, or your attack isn't good enough to create sustaniable damage. Simply to say, there is nothing you can do in the immediate future to make you better, you can only grind more and level up so you can try it again later. MMORPG is a game where time is the most important factor, not skill or tactics. It doesn't require a lot of knowledge to play the game, you press 5 or 6 hotkeys, maybe a few more if you are at max level, but the most important factor to your success is still how much time you have put in to make your character better.
A lot of MMOG players like to talk like there are many levels of strategy in traditional combat, I'm sure people will reply to this and try to say I'm wrong, but there isn't much strategy in MMOG, at least not as much as other genre or playstyle. In any kind of competition, player's reaction aka twitch, is fundamental to any kind of fair competition. RTS genre has arguably the most strategy involved, yet the most important factor that decides in professional players is that 'APM' how many action you can perform in a given minute. One main element in strategetic combat is that opponent shouldn't have to wait for your response, yet in MMORPG a lot of, presumably, older players are heavily against reactionary gameplay, citing the game should be about their characters, not themselves. While the reason is logically fine, just don't expect much fun competition or any heavier death penalities.
Bigger dealth penalties, eg: perma death, requires a game to have completely player based, how good a player is defines the succes of that character, in any fair competition, whether PVE or PVP, a player should be able to, complete any given challenge, disregarding their level, excepting varying difficulty to create a parity between skilfull players and noobish palyers. say single player/online lobby based games for example. CoF or Battlefront, a player at level 1 can kill a max level player at any given moment, yet it wont be as easy because of experience and knowledge of the game. Players in Assassin's creed can theoratically finish the entire game without any upgrades or leveling up, yet it will make the game extremely hard to complete, but in the end, you can compensate that with palyer skill. In the end, MMOG doesn't offer that kind of experience, there is no chance for that a loew level character able to complete any higher level content without getting one shot, or be able to dodge that one shot attack. MMOG needs to be less of a numbers game, but about how players actually play the game.
Dealth penalty is there to create a desire in the player to improve, not to make you feel, "well f*** that, I've just wasted the last hour to have to do this quest all over again"
Death penalty should pose a challenge, not a time sink.
How much WoW could a WoWhater hate, if a WoWhater could hate WoW?
As much WoW as a WoWhater would, if a WoWhater could hate WoW.
I highlighted in red the incorrect assumption that you're making. Obviously for some people, having a death penalty adds to the fun. Simply because you're not one of them doesn't mean that it's not possible to enjoy an element of risk. I personally find life way to short to endlessly grind mobs and raids with no element of risk or unpredictability. That's just work as far as I'm concerned, and I would literally rather just go to work and "grind up" something real than grind up pixels by killing scripted sprites.
Did I just destroy your argument?
My GF likes reading those fashion/gossip magazines. I personally would pay to not read them because I find them unbelievably boring and irritating, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't enjoy them, and clearly hundreds of thousands of other people enjoy them too. I dont make a huge fuss and post obvious logical fallacies in a campaign to try and make all magazines into The Economist and Scientific American - both of which she finds unreadably dull.
I just buy my magazines for me and she buys her magazines for her. All you have to do is play your game with no death penalty, and let me play my game with a death penalty. Different strokes for different folks. Just accept that some people will like stuff you dont like and that it's OK
Give me liberty or give me lasers
Player skill should be very important, in FPS games this usually works out fine since most equipment is the same. The problem is that MMO's are designed in a way that "Skill Levels" & "Gear" create the difference between a fresh player and a veteran. The new player or "noob" might be a far better player but the veteran has superior equipment and skill levels resulting in a massive edge over this new player.