Anyone else feeling...uninspired?

[Immut]

Dying is not fun.

Nonsense. Dying is the most fun you can have in a game. What isn't fun is being punished with minutes to hours of tedium or even losing the ability to play entirely as a result of dying.

Taking a page from the dragon quest series, a low death penalty (half your gold as opposed to having to restart the game from your last save point entirely) is merely an excuse to kill you. That's why titan is so terrible, everything pre-heart isn't even remotely hard, it's just tedious. Dying in post-heart? It's almost expected, shit's tough. Dying in pre-heart? What the hell is wrong with you, you have to be half asleep to get hit by that stuff. It's just keeping those of us who can do it from getting to the actually engaging part.

But in terms of the open world, some areas should be tough to get to, sure. But in general it should not be a wildly dangerous place. At least, not in a theme park MMO.

What super doesn't help is the design team thinking people are going to steadily progress from i50 to i60, to i70 up to i110, when in reality people jump from i50 to i90 almost immediately. So when they design all this i70 content, they're designing content for an audience that simply does not exist.