PVE Difficulty

Tippa made an interesting post over on her blog about The Miseducation of MMO Players.

Where have mmorpgs gone, in terms of difficulty? Indeed, where can they go? Back when you bounced mario around, you could lose all your lives and being sent right back to the start of the game worked out. What do you do when you have a hundreds of hours long game 'session'? Add a death jog every time someone stands in the flame?

I made a reply to someone in the comments about guild wars two supposedly not having any death penalty, which I've talked about here before. Here's the reply...

As far as I can tell guild wars 2 hasn’t removed a death penalty – if no one revives you, you have the classic death jog from some waypoint, back to where you were. Which is pretty lame – why bother coding in a time waster for players?

I think these games have trouble determining any fail point, which goes all the way back to gygax’s designs. With your traditional game, like a FPS, you have a level start, middle and end. What does a mmorpg have? middle, middle, middle, middle….

Your classic FPS can send you back to the start of a level and that works out. While mmorpgs are floundering on what the heck to do – can’t send them all the way to level one! But can’t just do nothing every time they are hit ( see my example of this: http://www.yoyogames.com/games/138974-proof-of-bad-concept ).

I think they need to do the reverse of the traditional design and grant people bonuses for doing well – like go for one hour of gameplay without being knocked to 0 hp and you will GAIN 500 gold (can be won once per RL day/X number of times per RL day)