Quote Originally Posted by Gruntler View Post
When you make the punishment for failing an encounter less than it needs to be, you make it possible to amp the actual difficulty in an encounter to a point where skill is necessary to overcome it.

Look at Dark Souls. It's hard, but once you're at a point where you're butting your head against a wall trying to overcome a challenge, you've got no souls to lose, so you have no punishment for failure and only reward for success. So the game can actually take off the kid gloves and keep at it.

Old school MMOs punished you hard for death--which meant that you came in prepared to kill it in one shot or you didn't fucking go. That meant that you had to design content that could be killed in one shot. You couldn't really do complicated rotations or anything like that--you just had overgeared toons zerging a boss.

And because of this, you can have bosses do incredibly punishing things in casual content, and players can learn and push themselves and become better. The first boss in Dead Ends is far far far FAR more difficult than what most raid bosses can be in games that punish the hell out of you for failing a little. And people wipe, and because all they've lost is time... they can just run back and try again.

The worst part about this complaint is that it's not even completely valid to all content. Do you actually want content that delevels you, sets you back for failure, or makes you start all over from the start? That actually exists! Go do Baldesion Arsenal or Delubrum Reginae Savage! One mistake can mean you're kicked out and have to start from the beginning allllll over again!
Ah memories of doing AV in FFXI and people deleveling because we died a bunch of times and someone forgot to cap out their exp.